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53 CHOMSKY’S INFLUENCE
allow, and Chomsyan grammar seeks the principles by which these languages
differ that will predict that precisely these differences will emerge.
(7) a. English:
Jean speaks French fluently.
*Jean speaks fluently French.
b. French:
Jean parle le français courament.
Jean parle courament le français.
(8) a. German:
Ich glaube, daß der Lehrer ein Buch gesehen hat.
I believe that the teacher a book seen has.
b. Dutch:
Ik geloof dat de leraar een boek heeft gezien.
I believe that the teacher a book has seen.
[Note the contrasting order of the words meaning ‘has’ and ‘seen’.]
Realism and mentalism
A particularly strong formulation of the realist (sometimes called God’s Truth:
Householder 1966) position in linguistics is given by Lightner (1983: 276): ‘In
linguistics, there is an overriding principle – an arbiter – to judge correctness
or incorrectness of theoretical constructs: if the construct corresponds to the
human brain’s treatment of language, it is correct; if not, incorrect’. Even with
such a strong statement, it can be difficult to say whether some construct is, as
the jargon has it, psychologically real. Does it mean that the human mind deals
with the data in a manner which is essentially parallel to the way in which it is
treated in the linguistic theory, or does it mean that the individual constructs
of the theory (for example, the individual rules, movements, components) have
counterparts in the human mind?
Language as a mental ‘organ’
Chomsky and his followers talk about language as a mental organ, a figure which
makes one think about gall-bladders and hearts, and which is misleading in the
sense that the language ‘organ’ does not appear to have any locational unity which
would differentiate it from the brain: the functions of language appear to be distributed
through the brain (see Everett 2006). The reasons for calling it an ‘organ’
are thus of some interest. They include (see Smith 2005: 84-5) the following:
• Except in pathological cases it is universally present in humans.
• Faults in the language faculty may be inherited.