The Literary Mind.pdf

LANGUAGE 163
and Paul Bloom have argued in the most unhedged fashion that it does. Language,
they assert, "is a topic like echolocation in bats or stereopsis in monkeys."
This extra hypothesis—that natural selection is entirely responsible for the hypothetical
grammar organ—might seem to put Pinker and Bloom even further away
than Chomsky from my hypothesis that language arose by projection of story.
But not so. In their practical attempts to explain how natural selection could have
produced a genetically coded mental organ, Pinker and Bloom implicitly embrace
an account of language in which grammar begins from meaning. They write,
"Language is a complex system of many parts, each tailored to mapping a characteristic
kind of semantic or pragmatic function onto a characteristic kind of
symbol sequence."
"Mapping" is the critical term and concept in this assertion. It is usually the
critical concept in any explanation of grammar as "encoding" something else, "signaling"
something else, "mapping" certain structures, and so on. Yet the role of
"mapping" in such explanations usually receives no comment, which is astounding.
"Mapping," which I have called "projection," is a mental competence; it does not
come for free in an explanation; it is instead the principal process to be explained.
To speak of "mapping" is to make a theoretical commitment to a powerful and
robust mental capacity of projection. Pinker and Bloom give various thumbnail
sketches of such mappings that appear to me essentially compatible with a claim
that grammar arises from the projection of narrative structure:
Noun phrases ... are used to describe things. Similarly, a verb like hit
is made into a verb phrase by marking it for tense and aspect and adding
an object, thus enabling it to describe an event. In general, words
encode abstract general categories and only by contributing to the structure
of major phrasal categories can they describe particular things,
events, states, locations, and properties Verb affixes signal the temporal
distribution of the event that the verb refers to (aspect) and the
time of the event (tense).
Pinker and Bloom's explanation depends upon the existence of a mental capacity
to project one kind of structure (story) onto something entirely different (vocal
sound), thereby creating for vocal sound grammatical structure. Pinker and Bloom
are assuming that the mental capacity for projection precedes grammar, or at least
that grammar cannot arise without projection. Pinker and Bloom obscure the fundamental
importance and complexity of this mental capacity by referring to it as
simple "encoding" or "signaling." This mental capacity—to encode, signal, map,
project—is what principally needs explaining in an account of grammar. In explaining
grammar, we are not discussing simple encoding such as "We call this