TEXT 8. Language, speech and writing

What I am concerned with in this chapter is not language in the most general sense of the term 'language' but with what can be described more fully as natural human language. Arguably, this fuller description is redundant in respect of either or both of the two adjectives, 'natural' and 'human'. Indeed, this is the view that most linguists and many philosophers of language would take. But it is worth making the point explicit and concentrating for a moment upon the implications of both of the qualifying adjectives, without prejudice to the question of whether there is any language, properly so called, that is non-natural or non-human.

Without dwelling upon the details let us say that a natural language is one that has not been specially constructed, whether for general or specific purposes, and is acquired by its users without special instruction as a normal part of the process of maturation and socialization. In terms of this rough-and-ready operational definition, there are some thousands of distinct natural human languages used in the world today, including English, Quechua, Dyirbal, Yoruba and Malayalam - to list just a few, each of which is representative, in various ways, of hundreds or thousands of others. But Esperanto, on the one hand, and first-order predicate calculus or computer languages such as algol, fortran and basic, on the other, are non-natural. Many non-natural languages are parasitic, to a greater or less extent, upon pre-existing natural languages. This being so, though non-natural, they are not necessarily unnatural; they may be comparable, structurally and perhaps also functionally, with the natural languages from which they derive and upon which, arguably, they are parasitic. I say 'arguably', not only because the point, as I have put it, is debatable, but also because by putting it in this way I am hinting at a deeper and theoretically more interesting sense of 'natural', and of its contrary 'unnatural', than my operational definition of 'natural language' requires.

It has been argued, notably by Chomsky, that languages that meet my operational, and intuitively applicable, definition of 'natural' do so, not simply as a matter of historical contingency, but by virtue of biological necessity: that natural human languages are structurally adapted to the psychological nature of man; and that if they were not so adapted, they could not be acquired, as I have said they are, without special instruction as an integral and normal part of the process of maturation and socialization. The question of whether natural human languages as we know them are also natural in this deeper sense (which I distinguish from other senses of 'natural' in Chapter 4 below) is of course philosophically controversial. I am not concerned with this question as such. It suffices for my present purpose that Chomsky and others inspired by his work, philosophers and psycholo­gists, have provided a serious defence of innatism (or nativism).

Granted that it is appropriate to use the term 'language' to refer to a wide range of communicative and symbolic systems employed by animals and machines, we can proceed to distinguish human from non-human languages. And this distinction can be drawn in various ways: we can define human languages as languages that are actually used by human beings; as languages that could be used by human beings (with what is meant by could spelt out); as languages that are normally or naturally (in one or other sense of 'naturally') used by human beings and so on. For present purposes, the following operational definition will suffice: a human language is one that is attested as being used (or as having been used in the past) by human beings; and a non-human language is one that is (or has been) used by any non-human being (either an animal or a machine). This definition leaves open the possibility that the intersection of the two sub-classes of languages thus distinguished is non-empty; i.e., that there are languages which are both human and non-human. It also presupposes, of course, that we have some way of identifying human beings that does not make the possession of language criterial in their identification. It would not do for us to adopt Schleicher's (1863) attitude: "If a pig were to say to me 'I am a pig', it would ipso facto cease to be a pig."

As with the distinction between natural and non-natural languages, so too with the distinction between human and non-human languages, as I have just drawn it; it can be argued that human languages share a number of structural properties, or design characteristics, that set them off as a class from the languages of other species, so that it is legitimate to talk not only of human languages, but also of human language in the singular. It is by coupling the two predicates 'natural' and 'human' and giving to each its deeper sense that we arrive of course at the characteristically Chomskyan thesis of innatism. As Chomsky put it in his Reflections on Language: "A human language is a system of remarkable complexity. To come to know a human language would be an extraordinary intellectual achievement for a creature not specifically designed to accomplish this task. A normal child acquires this knowledge on relatively slight exposure and without specific training" (1976: 4).

It is an obvious, but none the less important, fact that one cannot possess or use language (henceforth I shall restrict the term 'language' to natural human language) without possessing or using some particular language -English, Quechua, Dyirbal, Yoruba, Malayalam, or whatever. Each of these differs systematically from the others, so that, due allowance being made for the well-known problems of drawing a sharp distinction between languages and dialects, styles or registers, we can usually determine that someone is using one language rather than another on particular occasions. We do this, whether as investigating linguists or as participating interlocutors, by observing and analysing, not the language-behaviour itself, but the products of that behaviour - strings of words and phrases inscribed (in a technical sense of Inscribe') in some appropriate physical medium. But the language, for the linguist at least, is neither the behaviour nor the products of that behaviour, both of which are subsumed under the ambiguous English word 'utterance'. What the linguist is interested in is the language-system: the underlying, abstract, system of entities and rules by virtue of which particular language-inscriptions can be identified as tokens of the same type or distinguished as tokens of different types; can be parsed (to use the traditional term) or (in Chomskyan terminology) assigned an appropriate structural description; and can be interpreted in terms of the meaning of the constituent expressions, of the grammatical structure of the sentences that have been uttered, and of the relevant contextual factors.

We may distinguish the language-system, then, on the one hand from language-behaviour of a particular kind and on the other from language-inscriptions. The latter, together with native speakers' intuitions of grammaticality and acceptability, of sameness and difference of meaning, and so on, constitute the linguist's data; but they are not the object of linguistic theory or linguistic description. The linguist, I repeat, is interested in language-systems; and this is true not only in microlinguistics but also in the several branches of macrolinguistics (see Chapter 2).

And when linguists come to describe language-systems, whether they subscribe to the aims of generative grammar or not, they do so by drawing a distinction between phonology and syntax and by making reference, in the description of both, as also in the account that they give of the meaning of sentences, to the information that is stored in the lexicon, or dictionary.

(Lyons J. Natural Language and Universal Grammar // Essays in Linguistic Theory. vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, 1991. P.1–3)