Mini-Interview: Noam Chomsky & Morris Halle
Adam Fieled: I'm a poet & just becoming familiarized w/ linguistic theories. I've just finished (Noam Chomsky's) "Language and Responsibility" & "Reflections on Language". My question is simply this: if "universal grammar" is innate & accounts for language-structure abilities, is "poetic" ability (skill w/ metaphor, metrics, etc.) also an innate quality, rather than one fostered by interest, adaptability to "new" language-structures, etc.? Pursuant to this-- is investigation of poetics via linguistics a fruitful vista, do you think?
Noam Chomsky: There's quite a lot of works on poetics and linguistics. You might contact my colleagues and friends Samuel Jay Keyser and Morris Halle (both retired, but still at MIT, in linguistics department). They've done excellent work on it. There can hardly be any doubt that poetic ability (in the broad sense) is in part innate and universal, in part acquired, and in part just something about the person that no one knows how to explain. But not much more is known than when there were interesting speculations about these matters in the 17th-18th century. Schlegel and Coleridge, for example.
Morris Halle: I am not sure I know what answer you expect to your questions. Here is a stab at it. I take it that standing upright on one's feet, and walking and jumping are innate capabilities of every human. Some of us practice these abilities to the point where others will watch them, even pay money for the privilege. In parallel fashion, all of us produce (linguistic) utterances, but there are among us some who are able to produce utterances/discourses that have aesthetic value, whereas what most of us produce is aesthetically uninteresting. In part this ability must be innate: surely Shakespeare possessed an ability that none of us could hope to acquire, but lesser talents than Shakespeare no doubt learned how to write poems or plays or novels and got better at it. In sum, everything we do is to some extent innate (no one ever learns to fly or to jump over tall buildings), and practice usually helps.
Noam Chomsky: There's quite a lot of works on poetics and linguistics. You might contact my colleagues and friends Samuel Jay Keyser and Morris Halle (both retired, but still at MIT, in linguistics department). They've done excellent work on it. There can hardly be any doubt that poetic ability (in the broad sense) is in part innate and universal, in part acquired, and in part just something about the person that no one knows how to explain. But not much more is known than when there were interesting speculations about these matters in the 17th-18th century. Schlegel and Coleridge, for example.
Morris Halle: I am not sure I know what answer you expect to your questions. Here is a stab at it. I take it that standing upright on one's feet, and walking and jumping are innate capabilities of every human. Some of us practice these abilities to the point where others will watch them, even pay money for the privilege. In parallel fashion, all of us produce (linguistic) utterances, but there are among us some who are able to produce utterances/discourses that have aesthetic value, whereas what most of us produce is aesthetically uninteresting. In part this ability must be innate: surely Shakespeare possessed an ability that none of us could hope to acquire, but lesser talents than Shakespeare no doubt learned how to write poems or plays or novels and got better at it. In sum, everything we do is to some extent innate (no one ever learns to fly or to jump over tall buildings), and practice usually helps.
<< Home