Brain and Language 68, 393–401 (1999)Article ID brln.1999.2119, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

An On-Line Interview with Noam Chomsky: On the Natureof Pragmatics and Related Issues

Brigitte Stemmer

Centre de Recherche, Institut universitaire de geriatrie de Montreal, Canada, andLurija Institute for Rehabilitation and Health Sciences

at the University of Konstanz, Germany

When the idea of the special issue on pragmatics was born, so was theidea to invite two scientists who have had a tremendous impact on the fieldsof linguistics and pragmatics: Noam Chomsky and John R. Searle. Both as-sured me that the project sounded extremely interesting and that they wouldlove to be part of the project if it weren’t for the fact that one of them was,meanwhile, diving into different spheres and the other one ‘‘committed fora long time to come, with deadlines looming and sometimes passing at adepressing rate.’’ I was not able to compete with the spheres but thanks tomodern technology and an unconventional scientist, looming deadlines couldbe beaten: some authors and the editor of the special issue as well as theeditor of Brain and Language framed some questions which were sent toand readily discussed by Noam Chomsky via e-mail.

Question 1: How do you see contemporary clinical neuropsychologicalresearch influencing your views on language processing?

NC: The question is hard to answer because I have never had any particularviews of language processing beyond what seems fairly obvious: that if Joneshas the language L, then Jones’s language processing accesses L; thus inprocessing language, I access a variety of English, not Japanese. Here I un-derstand L (for me, some variety of English) to be an attained state of agenetically determined faculty of language FL (I overlook here irrelevantreal world complexities, e.g., the fact that no one is ‘‘monolingual’’ in thissense).

I follow the processing literature to see what I can learn from it aboutlanguage processing and about the nature of language, of course with particu-lar questions in mind: e.g., how apparent properties of language are ‘‘appor-tioned’’ among processing systems and the system L that they access.

Question 2: (a) Do you think that language is a module in a strictly Fodo-393

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rian sense of the term, i.e., a ‘‘stupid’’ satellite of a general-purpose centralmachinery, where ‘‘real intelligence’’ would lie? (b) Do you think that com-munication is, or at least could be, a competence in his (or Marr’s) terms?

Both questions relate to the position you might take on the domain-gener-ality vs domain-specificity debate. It seems to me that your idea of ‘‘mentalorgans’’ resembles the latter rather than the former position, but you seemto me rather obscure on the whole topic of the architecture of the mind. IfI am right, then when you (in a marginal remark in one of your books) talk of‘‘communicative competence,’’ you might mean something similar to what Imean: a mental organ, but an inferential, nonmodular one. Else, you wouldtake a Fodorian position and should therefore conceive of an intrinsicallyinferential process like communication as performance (i.e., as a task of thecentral system) rather than competence.

NC: Little can be said with any confidence about ‘‘the architecture of themind,’’ and for that reason I (purposely) remain ‘‘rather obscure on the wholetopic.’’ I have expressed my own (of course tentative) assumptions manytimes, for example in the opening parts of Reflections on Language [1975,(RL)]. The assumption here is that the architecture of the mind is modularin the sense that Randy Gallistel recently described as ‘‘the norm these daysin neuroscience.’’ In Gallistel’s words, in all animals learning is based onspecialized ‘‘learning mechanisms,’’ ‘‘instincts to learn’’ in specific ways,these being essentially ‘‘organs within the brain [that] are neural circuitswhose structure enables them to perform one particular kind of computa-tion,’’ as they do more or less reflexively apart from ‘‘extremely hostileenvironments’’; human language acquisition is instinctive in this sense,based on a specialized ‘‘language organ.’’ In RL, the ‘‘learning mecha-nisms’’ are called LT(O,D) (‘‘learning theories’’ for organism O in domainD); one of them—the one that particularly concerns me—is LT(Human,Language), the initial state of the human faculty of language FL, the special-ized ‘‘language organ’’ that attains various states under the triggering andshaping effect of experience, e.g., the language L that Jones has.

We can describe the initial state of LT(Human, Language) as a devicethat maps experience into state L attained, hence a ‘‘language acquisitiondevice’’ (LAD). The existence of such LAD is sometimes regarded as con-troversial or even as having been disproven. If terms are being used in theirtechnical sense, these conclusions amount to saying that there is no dedicated‘‘language module,’’ in which case it remains a mystery why my grand-daughter’s pet kitten (or chimpanzee or whatever) doesn’t acquire a particu-lar language just as she does, given essentially the same experience. I doubtthat anyone believes that; when investigated at all closely, proposals about‘‘general learning mechanisms’’ that apply to language seem to presupposeextremely rich innate language-dedicated structure, often richer than pro-posed in familiar linguistic theories (e.g., ‘‘irregular verb modules’’). I knowof no approach to these matters, including the most extreme ‘‘radical behav-

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iorist’’ approaches, that does not presuppose (often tacitly) that a child cansomehow distinguish linguistic materials from the rest of the confusion,again presupposing FL, hence LAD.

The way to make the general assumptions less obscure is to discover thenature of the various specialized ‘‘learning mechanisms’’—the systemsLT(O,D), in my terminology—among them the ‘‘language organ’’ FL, thestates it can in principle attain, the ‘‘neural circuits’’ involved, and so on.That is also the way to arrive at one or another ‘‘position . . . in the domain-generality vs domain-specificity debate,’’ a very tentative position I wouldthink, given the limits of current understanding. I concede that I don’t reallyunderstand what this debate is about in the way it is usually waged (withoutmy participation). There are very interesting questions about just what mightbe specific to human language [part of LT(Human, Language), the dedicated‘‘learning mechanism’’ that is the ‘‘language organ’’]. These are the topicsof inquiry in all studies of language and other cognitive systems that I knowof. But I do not understand the more general ‘‘debate’’ that seems to arousemuch passion.

It could be that one of the systems that develops, either as a distinct moduleor a component of others, is the kind of ‘‘communicative competence’’ thatenables us to use language coherently and in ways that are appropriate tosituations. This seems rather likely, for one reason, because of dissociationsthat have been discovered (limited communicative competence along withrich language competence, etc.). Whether this system, if it exists, is an ‘‘in-ferential, nonmodular one’’ depends on the facts of the matter: e.g., are theproperties of ‘‘communicative competence’’ similar to those of finding ourway home when we come upon a detour? Does ‘‘communicative compe-tence’’ function independently (or partly independently) of general inferen-tial capacities (if such exist)? There is evidence on these matters, and interest-ing efforts to organize it systematically, but far too little is understood, asfar as I am aware, to take a confident stand. My own personal impression,for what it is worth, is that talk of ‘‘general inferential or problem-solvingcapacities’’ tends to be rather empty and that when we investigate actualcases in one or another organism, we find that specific mechanisms are as-sumed. But that’s a matter for discovery, not pronouncements.

It is perhaps worth adding that one should be careful not to be misled byidiosyncratic informal usages. In particular, in English one uses the locutions‘‘know a language,’’ ‘‘knowledge of language,’’ where other (even similar)linguistic systems use such terms as ‘‘have a language’’ and/or ‘‘speak alanguage.’’ That may be one reason why it is commonly supposed (by En-glish speakers) that some sort of cognitive relation holds between Jones andhis language, which is somehow ‘‘external’’ to Jones; or that Jones has a‘‘theory of his language,’’ a theory that he ‘‘knows’’ or ‘‘partially knows.’’The systematic ambiguity of the term ‘‘grammar’’ in technical linguistics,though constantly emphasized, may also have contributed to such conclu-

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sions, along with the fact that the term ‘‘language’’ of English (and relatedthough typically not identical concepts of other languages) is used in waysthat involve sociopolitical, teleological, and normative elements, colors onmaps, and stability of empires, and so on. One should not expect such con-cepts to play a role in systematic inquiry into the nature, use, and acquisitionof language and related matters any more than one expects such informalnotions as ‘‘heat’’ or ‘‘element’’ or ‘‘life’’ to survive beyond rudimentarystages of the natural sciences.

Let’s turn to questions (a) and (b).With regard to (a), the notion of modularity discussed in RL and elsewhere

and explored in studies of FL and particular languages (states of FL, frommy point of view) is not inconsistent with Fodorian modularity but is a differ-ent notion. Fodorian modularity is concerned primarily with input systems.In contrast, RL modularity is concerned with cognitive systems: specialized‘‘learning mechanisms,’’ their initial states and states attained; and how input(perceptual) and output (language use) systems access the states attained.Whether these input and output systems are modular in Fodor’s sense is adistinct question. Though related, the topics and conceptions of modularityare different.

As Fodor puts the matter in his Modularity of Mind, ‘‘the perceptual sys-tem for a language comes to be viewed as containing quite an elaboratetheory of the objects in its domain; perhaps a theory couched in terms of agrammar of the language.’’ I would prefer to rephrase this by saying thatthe perceptual system for Jones’s language L (a state of FL) accesses L.Theories of L (and FL) are what the linguist seeks to discover; adaptingtraditional terms, the linguist’s theory of Jones’s L can be called ‘‘a grammarof L,’’ and the theory of FL can be called ‘‘universal grammar,’’ but it isthe linguist, not Jones, who has a theory of L and FL. Jones has L, but notheory of L (except what he may believe about the language he has, whichhas no privileged status, any more than what he may believe about his visualsystem or problem-solving capacities).

When we look more closely, we see that more is involved here than choiceof terminology, but let us put that aside. Clearly the notions of modularityare different, as are the questions raised, though they are not incompatible,except perhaps in one sense: FL and L appear to be ‘‘central systems’’ inFodor’s framework, but the assumption of RL (and Gallistel’s ‘‘norm of neu-roscience’’) is that they are distinctive components of the central ‘‘architec-ture of mind,’’ so that the ‘‘central systems’’ would not be unstructured—what Fodor calls ‘‘Quinean and isotropic’’ and what Tirassa, if I understandhim, calls ‘‘inferential, nonmodular.’’

In any event, the concept of modularity I have discussed for the past 40years (e.g., in RL) is definitely not one that takes language (FL and its states)to be ‘‘a ‘stupid’ satellite of a general-purpose central machinery, where ‘realintelligence’ would lie.’’ That would be a category mistake, conflating the

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perceptual system (the Fodorian input module) with the cognitive system Lit accesses (what Fodor calls the ‘‘theory of the objects in its domain’’). Ithink this is explicit in RL and elsewhere, and I hope it is put as clearly asour limited understanding warrants.

Turning to (b), communication is an action, not a competence (whetherthe term ‘‘competence’’ is being used in its technical or its informal sense).It’s possible that a form of ‘‘communicative competence’’ underlies the useof language for communication (one of its many uses). As for Marr’s famousthree levels of analysis, he was concerned with input–output systems (e.g.,the mapping of retinal images to internal representations). Language is notan input–output system. Accordingly, Marr’s levels do not apply to the studyof language, though one could adapt them to the very different problem ofcharacterizing cognitive systems accessed in processing and production.

Question 3: What do you think of neurolinguistics these days?NC: I share the general hope that new noninvasive technologies will make

it possible to circumvent, at least in part, the barriers to direct experiment.These include the obvious ethical barriers and the apparent biological isola-tion of the human faculty of language in essential respects, which has ren-dered animal experimentation pretty much irrelevant to the study of language(even putting aside ethical barriers); to quote Gallistel again, ‘‘we may neverbe able to study the neural basis of language perception in animals [let alonelanguage as a cognitive system accessed in language perception] for the samereason that you cannot use a mammal to study the neural basis of polarizationperception.’’ New technologies hold considerable promise, one hopes. Thataside, more traditional neurolinguistic inquiries continue to yield intriguingresults. To mention one recently published example, Yossi Grodzinsky andLisa Finkel report finding a distinction between dislocation of phrasal andof lexical categories in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia, a result that could relateto (still unpublished) ideas proposed at the borders of inquiry into the natureof language. That’s just one case, which happens to interest me particularly.

More generally, I don’t see any principled way to distinguish linguistics(meaning, the branch of the study of language we are discussing here) fromneurolinguistics any more than one can distinguish chemistry from physicalchemistry in principle. These may be useful distinctions for temporary pur-poses, but one looks forward to erosion of such boundaries as understandingprogresses. My own view has always been that the part of the study of lan-guage relevant here is in principle part of human biology: ‘‘biolinguistics,’’as some have called it.

Question 4: (a) Levinson, in his book on pragmatics (1983), discusses therole of pragmatics within linguistic theory. He argues that a general linguistictheory must incorporate pragmatics as a component or level in the overallintegrated theory: ‘‘In order to construct an integrated theory of linguistic

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competence, it is essential to discover the logical ordering of componentsor levels. For example, Chomsky has elegantly argued that syntax is logicallyprior to phonology, in that phonological descriptions require reference tosyntactic categories, but not vice versa; syntax is thus AUTONOMOUS withrespect to phonology, and phonology (non-autonomous with respect to syn-tax) can be envisaged as taking a syntactic input, on the basis of which pho-nological representations can be built up. Accepting for a moment this kindof argument, the question is, is it possible to argue that there is some acceptedcomponent of grammar that is non-autonomous with respect to pragmatics(i.e. some component requiring pragmatic input)? If so, pragmatics must belogically prior to that component, and so must be included in an overalltheory of linguistic competence.’’ (p. 34).

What is your view on Levinson’s argument?(b) Do you think it is worthwhile to postulate a ‘‘neuro’’ aspect of prag-

matics?NC: As for (a), perhaps I should begin with some terminological/concep-

tual clarification. My own view has always been stronger than what youquote from Levinson: ‘‘a general linguistic theory must incorporate pragmat-ics’’ not only ‘‘as a component or level in the overall integrated theory,’’but as a central and crucial component (for irrelevant terminological reasons,I wouldn’t call it a ‘‘level’’ in the technical sense).

My first (non-)publication on these topics is a very long manuscript calledLogical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, revised 1956, version pub-lished in part in 1975). Here, and in everything else I’ve written as far as Ican recall, I used the term ‘‘syntax’’ in its traditional (Peircean, Fregean,Carnapian, etc.) sense and assumed a kind of ‘‘use theory of meaning’’ (in-fluenced at the time by the later Wittgenstein and John Austin particularly).Thus by ‘‘syntax,’’ I mean the study of symbolic systems, including what-ever computational/representational systems we take to be internal to themind/brain. That includes formal relations among the elements of these sys-tems (e.g., rhyme and entailment, insofar as these are formal relations amonginternal symbolic objects), model-theoretic semantics (insofar as the modelsare considered to be internal objects, i.e., ‘‘mental models’’—as in practicethey are, in my opinion, contrary to what is often asserted), formal semanticsbased on a relation R (sometimes called ‘‘reference’’) holding between sym-bolic objects (e.g., between ‘‘London’’ and its ‘‘semantic value,’’ not anentity in the world, or even the world as we conceive it to be, but of someinternal system of thought that is itself related to the world), and so on.Continuing to take Jones’s language L to be a state of FL, Jones uses thesyntactic objects of L in a variety of ways: internal thought (statisticallyby far the most prevalent use, I suppose), maintaining personal relations,communication, telling stories, and so on. The study of such uses of languageis ‘‘pragmatics’’ in a conventional terminology. Whether there is also a se-mantics of natural language in the traditional sense, based on a true reference

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relation between symbolic objects of L and external objects (in the real worldor the external world as conceived and imagined) seems to me an open ques-tion. I have always been rather skeptical, for reasons discussed elsewhere.In any event, it is a matter for discovery, not stipulation.

From this point of view, ‘‘pragmatics’’ must be a central component ofany linguistic theory that aims to be comprehensive.

To continue with terminology, I’ve used ‘‘syntax’’ in both a narrow anda broad sense. The broad sense is the traditional one, just mentioned. Thenarrow sense is theory internal. Suppose we postulate that one part—call itNS—of the internal syntactic (computational-representational) system of FLconstructs syntactic objects that are mapped to ‘‘phonetic form’’ (accessibleto sensorimotor systems) and to ‘‘logical form’’ (accessible to the systemsof thought, conceptual-intentional systems). Then ‘‘narrow syntax’’ is thestudy of NS. That’s one usage, which (purposely) leaves open many impor-tant questions to be answered by empirical inquiry: e.g., where does determi-nation of quantifier scope or anaphoric relations enter into the broad syntax?These empirical assumptions do hold that narrow syntax is ‘‘prior to phonol-ogy’’ in that the objects constructed independently by NS are mapped tophonetic form by a component of the syntax that we may call ‘‘phonology’’(in a very general sense, including morphological processes, and—in myopinion—operations that have the properties of grammatical transforma-tions). But these are empirical questions which are quite lively and controver-sial. No one can sensibly regard them as matters of doctrine.

Suppose (as the question suggests) that we tentatively adopt empiricalassumptions of this nature. Then let us consider the question raised: ‘‘is itpossible to argue that there is some accepted component of grammar that isnon-autonomous with respect to pragmatics (i.e. some component requiringpragmatic input)’’ in which case ‘‘pragmatics must be logically prior to thatcomponent, and so must be included in an overall theory of linguistic compe-tence’’? I suppose it is possible to argue that the computational-representa-tional system accesses features of language use, though what such a systemwould look like, I have no idea. Suppose, for example, we consider the(plainly correct) fact that in a linguistic interchange, new/old information isa matter of background that participants assume to be shared (what is some-times misleadingly called ‘‘discourse’’; there need be no discourse in anysignificant sense of that term). Suppose further (as appears to be correct)that old/new information relates to ‘‘displacement effects’’ in narrow syntax.And suppose further (merely for concreteness) that we take these displace-ment effects to be expressed in narrow syntax by transformational operations.Should we then say that the operations of object-shift, topicalization, andso on literally access shared background information? This seems close toincoherent; any clarification of these intuitive ideas that I can think of yieldscomputational systems of hopeless scope, compelling us to try to formulatewhat amount to ‘‘theories of everything’’ that cannot possibly be the topic

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of rational inquiry (NB: not TOE in the technical sense of physics, whichis a totally different matter). A more reasonable approach, I think, is to takethe operations to be ‘‘autonomous,’’ i.e., syntax in the broad sense, and tounderstand pragmatics to be a theory concerned with the ways properties ofexpressions (such as displacement) are interpreted by language-external (butperson-internal) systems in terms of old/new information. That leaves uswith manageable and coherent questions. The conclusion generalizes to othersuch matters, in my opinion. If that’s correct, then syntax (broad or narrow)will be ‘‘autonomous’’ of pragmatics—though I might add that ‘‘autonomyof syntax’’ is a term I do not think I have ever used, except in reaction toreferences to some alleged ‘‘autonomy of syntax’’ thesis, sometimes attrib-uted to me. There is a one-sided debate about ‘‘autonomy of syntax’’; one-sided in that only critics of the alleged thesis take part. There are a numberof such debates, including the debate over what critics call the ‘‘innatenesshypothesis’’ (also often attributed to me, Fodor, and others). I have no ideawhat the phrase is supposed to mean and correspondingly have never advo-cated any such hypothesis—beyond the truism that there is some language-relevant distinction, to be discovered, between my granddaughter and herpet kitten (monkey, rock, etc.).

Should pragmatics ‘‘be included in an overall theory of linguistic compe-tence’’? We seem to be back to terminology. As noted, I’ve always assumedthat pragmatics is a central part of general linguistic theory; my own viewis rather extreme in this regard, as just discussed. As for the term ‘‘compe-tence,’’ it has the informal meaning of ordinary usage and also a technicalmeaning, which is whatever its users assign to it (as in the case of ‘‘tensor,’’‘‘undecidability’’ in the technical sense, etc.). I am familiar with only onetechnical sense, the one I’ve used for many years to mark the conceptualdistinction between what Jones knows and what Jones does (competence vsperformance), a distinction that is not controversial. I introduced the techni-cal term in a (probably vain) effort to avoid pointless debate engendered byuncritical use of the informal English notion ‘‘knowledge’’ or use of techni-cal concepts of knowledge introduced in the philosophical literature that di-verge considerably from informal usage (which is fine, as long as it is recog-nized clearly, in which case the debates dissolve).

If we are using the term ‘‘competence’’ in my technical sense, then prag-matics is not part of a theory of linguistic competence, for uninterestingterminological reasons. If we are using the term ‘‘competence’’ in its ordi-nary English sense, then I suppose one might say that pragmatics is part oflinguistic competence, but the conclusion is again uninteresting, merely amatter of terminology. I don’t see any other way to interpret the question.Perhaps I am missing the point.

Let’s turn to (b): is it ‘‘worthwhile to postulate a ‘neuro’ aspect of prag-matics?’’ If pragmatics is the study of use of language, then it has somebasis in the human organism, partly the brain (it presumably also includes

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much else, including gesture, etc.). If that much is agreed, then we are postu-lating that brain mechanisms are involved in pragmatics, including those thatenter into organization of motor action, perception, and so on. One assumesthat these include neural mechanisms crucially, though perhaps there areother relevant brain mechanisms—‘‘brain’’ is an informal term. Again, Idon’t really understand what is at issue.

End of interview.