Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? Page #8
So it's understandable
that there should be
one or another form
of religious belief.
I think we should change
the camera.
I think it's time for the break.
- Lunch break.
- Oh, I see, okay.
So we get another camera next time?
Yeah, I'm going to use
this one, because I...
Okay.
The discussion is so good,
I don't want to lose a drop.
In fact, I eventually decided
to stick to my plan
and continue to shoot
the rest of the interview
with my old mechanical Bolex.
This way, I could only film
short fragments of Noam,
and I was committed
to what moments he would appear
in the final version.
I was also committed
to have to animate 98%
of the whole film
and hear the sound
of my cranky camera
each time Noam would appear
so I would have to illustrate
its sound every single time.
Do you remember
what was your first
thinking of linguistics?
There's background.
Like, when I was a child,
my father worked on history
of the Semitic languages,
so I read work of his.
Like, I read
his doctoral dissertation
when I was... I don't know...
10,12 years old.
It was on a medieval grammarian,
medieval Hebrew grammarian,
so I kind of knew... had some
acquaintance with the field.
Later I sort of got into it
by accident.
And when I got into it,
I found it intriguing, but...
and did things
that we were taught to do.
And at some point, I realized,
"This doesn't make any sense."
You know, the way
we're taught to do things
was descriptivist.
So the way you...
linguistics at that time
and, to a large extent, still
is a matter of organizing data.
So a typical assignment
when I was an undergraduate,
let's say, would be to take data
from some American Indian language
and put it into an organized form.
You didn't ask the question,
"Why is the data this way
and not some other way?"
That wasn't a question
that was asked.
In fact, I remember, dramatically,
the first talk I gave
when I was a graduate student
invited to a major university
to give a talk
on work that I was doing,
the normal thing.
The leading figure
in the department,
one of the famous linguists,
met me at the airport,
and, you know,
we drove to the college,
and on the way, we talked,
and I asked him
what he was working on.
And he said
he's not doing any work now.
What he's doing is just
collecting data and storing it,
and he had a good reason,
which is implicit
in the linguistics of that day
in Europe and the United States.
Computers were coming along,
so pretty soon,
you'd be able to analyze
huge masses of data.
It was assumed that the procedure,
the methods of analysis
that had been reached
in the structuralist traditions,
that they were the right way
to understand everything
about language.
Well, you know, if you
sharpened up those procedures,
you could program it
for a computer.
Then you feed the data in,
and you're done.
How old were you?
- That was 1953.
- Okay.
So, I mean, I kind
of half believed it,
because that's the way
I was trained,
but the other half of my brain
was telling me,
"This makes absolutely no sense."
Can you tell me the transition
and also the inspiration
that started your theory?
It was pretty straightforward.
When I was an undergraduate,
I had to get an honors thesis.
You do a piece of work
that's your honors thesis.
And the faculty member
who I was working with...
very famous and very
significant person,
very influential, rightly...
he suggested to me
that I do a structural analysis
of modern Hebrew.
Well, I knew some Hebrew,
so it made sense,
and I did what we
were supposed to do.
What you're supposed to do
is get an informant
and then carry out
field work procedures.
So there's a set of routines
you go through
to take the data
from the informant, you know,
find the phonology,
find the morphology, you know,
a few comments about
syntactic structure,
comments about the semantics,
and that's your thesis.
So I started going through
the routine with him.
And after about a month,
I realized,
"This is totally ridiculous."
I mean, I know the answers
to these questions.
Why am I asking him?
And the questions that I don't
know the answers to,
like the phonetics,
I don't care about.
But the parts that I care about,
I already basically know
the answers,
so what do I care?
Why do I have to get it from him?
So I stopped the informant work,
and I just started doing
what seemed like
the obvious thing to do:
write a generative grammar.
And that's what I did,
but it was kind of a hobby.
I don't think
anyone even looked at it.
You know, in fact,
it finally was published
about 30 years later, I think.
Can you tell me,
like, in a simple way,
like, this first approach
of generative grammar?
It's almost a truism.
I mean, if you think
about what a language is,
say, what you and I know,
we have somehow in our heads
a procedure for constructing
an infinite array
of structured expressions,
each of which is assigned a sound
and assigned
a semantic interpretation.
This is like a truism.
Furthermore,
these structured expressions
have the property of
what's called digital infinity.
They're like the numbers,
the natural numbers.
You know, there's five and six
but nothing in between.
That's not natural numbers anymore.
And the same with language.
There's a five-word sentence,
a six-word sentence.
There's no 51/2 word sentence.
They're very much unlike, say,
the communication system of bees
or any other system, you know.
Now, that's very rare
in the natural world,
digital infinity.
And by that time, say, late '40s,
the mathematics of it
were well understood.
The theory of computation
had been developed,
theory of recursive functions.
So these were familiar concepts
within contemporary mathematics,
and, you know, I studied them
when I studied advanced logic
and mathematics.
And it just sort of fell together.
The... you have this system
of digital infinity.
It's a procedure of some sort
that generates an infinity
of structured expressions.
That's a generative grammar,
in fact; that's all it is.
So that ought to be
the core of the study.
And then comes the question,
"Well, okay, what is it?"
Then you run into the problem
I mentioned before.
As soon as you try to do it,
you find
that in order to deal
with the data available,
it has to be extremely complex
and intricate.
But that doesn't make any sense
either,
because every child masters it
in no time,
so somehow it can't be rich
and complex.
And then comes the field.
The field is to try to show
that what appears to be
rich and complex
is, at the core, just very simple.
Actually, you know,
when you think about it,
as we started to do from the '50s,
there's an evolutionary basis
for this too.
Language is a very
curious phenomenon.
I mean, one question
we ought to be puzzled with,
two questions is, "Why are there
any languages at all?"
And another one is,
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"Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 23 Dec. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/is_the_man_who_is_tall_happy_10984>.
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