Introduction

Raison d’être

‘Why study language?’ you may ask.

To answer this question, I may quote Noam Chomsky’s answer to Dr Mazen Al-Waer: “when someone introduces himself in a party as a doctor, people will wonder in which hospital he works, and when somebody introduces himself as a lawyer, everybody will think when he has a legal problem, the lawyer would be able to help. But when you introduce yourself as a linguist people will be astonished and ask what do you mean by linguistics? And when you try to explain to them that linguistics is a scientific study of languages, they will say, ‘well, why do you bother and study languages since we speak them naturally?’ Do you think that linguistics can change people’s opinions one day, and do you think the study of linguistics is important?”

Chomsky: “In our own intellectual tradition going back to the Greeks it has always been assumed, and I think correctly, that the most important topic to study is the human being, the question what is the nature of humans, and in particular, how the human mind works. There can hardly be a more significant topic for investigation for us than the human mind and how it functions. The most interesting aspects of the human mind are those intellectual achievements that are carried out naturally, that seem so obvious to us that we cannot even see at first that there is a problem to be studied. The first difficulty that you have to overcome if you want to study human beings is to tryto attain a sense of wonder and surprise at the fact that you are able to do what you are able to do normally. If you do not think about it, it seems obvious that you just talk and say what is on your mind. But the question is: how are you able to do this? What is about the child that makes it possible for the child to acquire this ability but does not make it possible for an ape or a dog or any other organism to acquire this ability? What is this capacity? What underlies it? What are its properties? What are its features?

The psychologist, Wolfgang Kohler, once remarked that it is necessary to develop a kind of “psychic distance” [italics mine] from the acts that you perform naturally. You have to be able to look at them as it were from the outside, to recognize how amazing they are, before you can begin to try to find out what are the capacities on which these acts are based. It is not a problem when you study, say, physics because, since we are studying something that is external to us, we already have psychic distance. We do not move the planets so therefore the fact that the planets move already seems remarkable. But since we are the ones who are doing th