~~~

'; •=

;. ' ~~~

n

,,,

,,~,

~~

/'

r ems.

~

,~,1

1

'

'(

r 1~,~ r

te;

~ ~

~

'•

~`,

j~~.o

;~•

~l~ ~-' "

l

.-.

~4,,

.0

,,

ut~`

~y

, a~~

,,~......'

F,.,___~

'4vb

~

rte

,,~

`~"

`~

z,.-'

~~ ~~

~~ ~~~~E

]L~~~~

anguage comes so naturally to us that it is easy to forget what a strange

and miraculous gift it

is. All over the world members.of our species fash-

ion their breath into hisses and hums and squeaks and pops and listen to oth-

ers do the same. We do this, of course, not only because we Iike the sounds

but because details of the sounds contain information about the intentions of

the person making them. We humans are fitted with a means of sharing our

ideas, in

all their unfathomable vastness. When we listen to speech, we can be

led to think thoughts that have never been thought before and that never

would have occurred to us on our own. Behold, th

e bush burned with fire, and

the bush was not consumed. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, cl

ever, and rich, with a comfortable home and

happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best k~lessings of existence.

Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. I have found

it impossi-

ble to carry the heave burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as

King without the help and support of the woman I love_

Language has fascinated people for thousands of years, and linguists have

studied every detail, from the number of languages spoken in New Guinea to

why we say rc~~.le-dazzle instead of da

zzle-rnzzle.Yet to me the first and deepest

challenge in understanding language is accounting for its boundless expressive

power. What is the trick behind our ability to

fill one another's heads with so

many different ideas?

Z

Words and Rules

The premise of this book is that there are two trick, words and rules. They

work by different principles, are learned and used in difFerent ways, and may even

reside in different parts of the brain. T

heir border disputes shape and reshape lan-

guages over centuries, and make language not only a tool for communication but

also a medium for wordplay and poetry and an heirloom of endless fascination.

The first trick, the word, is based on a memorized arbitrary pairing between a

sound and a meaning. "What's in a name?" asks Juliet. "That which we call a

rose by any other name would smell as sweet." What's in a name is that every-

o~e in a language community tacitly agrees to use a particular sound to convey

a particular idea. Although the word rose does not smell sweet or have thorns,

we can use it

to convey the idea of a rose because

all of us have learned, at our

mother's knee or in the playground, the same link between a noise and a

thought. Now any of us can convey the thought by making the noise.

The theory that words work by a conventional pairing of sound and meaning is

not banal or uncontroversial. In the earliest s

urviving debate on linguistics, P

lato

has Hermogenes say, "Nothing has

its name by nature, but only by usage and

custom." Cratylus disagrees. "There is a correctness of name existing by nature

for everything: a name is not simply that which a number of people jo

intly ab ee

to call a thing." Crarylus is a creationist, and suggests that "a power greater than

man assigned the first names to things." Today, those who see a correctness of

names might attribute it instead to onomatopoeia (words such as crash and oink

that sound like what they mean) or to sound symbolism (words such as sneer,

cc~ntankeroais, and mellifluous that naturally call to mind the things they mean).

Today this debate has been resolved in favor of Hermogenes' co

nventional

pairing. Early in this century Ferdinand de Saussure, a founder of modern lin-

guistics, called such pairing the arbitrary sign and made it a cornerstone of the

study of la

nguage. ~

Onomatopoeia and sound symbolism certainly e~dst, but they

are asterisks to the far more important principle of the arbitrary sign—or else we

would understand the words in every foreign language instinctively, and never

need a dictionary for our own! Even the most obviously onomatopoeic words—

those for animal sounds—are notoriously unpredictable, with pigs oinking boo-

boo in Japan and dogs barking gong gong in Indonesia. Sound symbolism, for its

part, was no friend of the American woman in the throes of labor who overheard

what struck her as the most beautiful word in the English language and named

her newborn daughter Meconium, th

e medical term for fe

tal eYcrement.-

The Infinite Library 13

Though simple, the principle of the arbitrary sign is a powerful tool for get-

ting thoughts from head to head. Children begin to learn words before their

first birthda}; and by their second they hoover them up at a rate of.one every

two hours. By the time they enter school children command 13,000 words, .

and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from both

speech and print. A typical high-school graduate I:nows about 60,000 words; a

literate adult, perhaps twice that number.3 People recognize words swiftly. The

meaning of a spoken word is accessed by a listeners brain in about a fifth of a

second, before the speaker has finished pronouncing

it.`~ The meaning of a

printed word is registered even more quickly, in about an eighth of a second.

People produce words almost as rapidly: It takes the brain about a quarter of a

second to find a word to name an object, and about another quarter of a sec-

ond to program the mouth and tongue to pronounce it

.bThe arbitrary sign works because a speaker and a listener can call on identi-

cal entries in their mental dictionaries. The speaker has a thought, makes a

sound, and counts on the listener to hear the sound and recover that thought.

To depict an entry in the mental dicrionaty we need a way of showing the entry

itself, as well as its sound and meaning. The entry for a word is simply its ad-

dress in one's memory, li

ke the location of the boldfaced entry for a word in a

real dictionary. It

's convenient to use an English letter sequence such as r-o-

s-e

to stand for tI-ie entry, as long as we remember this is just a mnemonic tag that

allows us to remember which word the entry corresponds to; any symbol, such

as 42759, would do ju

st as well. To depict the word's sound, we can use a pho-

netic notation, such as [roz].~ The meaning of a word is a link to an eptry in

the person's mental encyclopedia, which captures the person's concept of a

rose. For convenience we can symbolize it with a picture, such as

t~33. So a

mental dictionary entry looks something like this:

rose so

und: r6<

meaning: ~

"This book uses a simplified phonetic notation similaz m that f

ound in dictionaries, i

n which

the long vowels d in bait, e in

beet, z in

bite, o in boat, a

nd u in Uoot are distinguished From the

shott v

on~els k in bat, e in

bei, i

in bit, o in pot, and u in I~ut. t

ln unadorned a stands for t

he fi

rst

vowel in fa

ther or yapa. T

he symbol ~ i

s used for [h

e neutral vowel in the suffix of melted and

Rose's (e

.g., nz

elti~, ro

z}z), a version of t

he vowel sometimes called s

chwa.

"Long

voti~el," "

short vowel," a

nd ocher technical terms in linguistics, ps

ycholinguistics, and

neuroscience are defined in the Glossaq:

4 ~

Words and Rules

A final component is the word's part of speech, or Grammatical category,

D which for rose is noun (N):

rose so

und: roz

meaning: ~

part of speech: N

And that brings us to the second trick behind the vast expressive power of

language.

People do not ju

st blurt out isolated words but rather cm~xbine them into phrases

and sentences, in which the meaning of the combination can be inferred from

the meanings of the words and the way they are arranged. We talk not merely of

roses, but of the red rose, proud rose, s

ad rose of al

l my days. We can express our

feelings about bread and roses, guns and roses, the War of the Roses, or days of

wine and roses. We can say that lovely is

the rose, ro

ses are red, or a rose is a rose

is a rose. When we combine words, their ananbement is crucial: Violets are red,

roses are blue, though containing all the ingredients of the familiar verse, means

something very different. We all know the difference between young women

looking f

or husbands and hxisbands loolzing for young women, and that looking

women husbands yoticng for doesn't mean anything at al

l.

Inside everyone's head there must be a code or protocol or set of rules that

specifies how words may be arranged into meaningful combinations. Modern

linguists call it a grammar, sometimes a generative brnmmar to distinguish it

from the grammars used to teach foreign languages or to teach the dos and

don'ts of formal prose.

A grammar assembles words into phrases according to the words' part-of-

speech categories, such as noun and verb. To highlight a word's category and

reduce visual clutter often it is convenient to omit the sound and meaning and

put the category label on top.

N Irose

Similarly, the word a, an article or cleteri~ainer, would look like this:

The Infinite Library

~ 5

det

a

They can then be joined into the phrase a rose by a rule that jo

ins a determiner

to a noun to yield a noun phrase (NP). The rule can be shown as a set of con-

nected branches; this one says "a noun phrase may be composed of a deter-

minerfollowed by a noun':

NP

/ \

det

N

The symbols at the bottom of the branches are like slots into which words may

be plugged, as long as the words have the same labels growing

o"ut of their

tops. Here is the result, t

he phrase a rose:

NP

/ \

det

N

a

rose

With just two more rules eve can build a complete toy grammar. One rule de-

fines apredicate or verb phrase (VP); the rule says that a verb phrase may con-

sist of a verb followed by it

s direct object, a noun phrase:

VP

/ \

V

NP

The other rule defines the sentence itself (S). This rule says that a sentence

may be composed from a noun phrase (the subject) followed by a verb phrase

(the predicate):

S

NP

VP

When words are plugged into phrases according to these rules, and the

phrases are plugged into bigger phrases, we get a complete sentence, such as

A rose is a rose:

6 ~

Words and Rules

S

/ \

NP

VP

det

N V

NP

1 ~

~ /

a rose is d

et N

1 ~

a rose

Other parts of the rules, not sho~m here, sp

ecify the meaning of the new com-

bination. For example, the complete NP rule says that the meaning of the }'

el-

low rose of Tomas is based on the meaning of rose, which is called the head of

the phrase, and that the other words modify the head in various ways: yellrnv

specifies a distinctive trait, T~s it

s location.

These rules, though crude, illustrate the fantastic expressive power made

available by grammar. First, the rules are prod2.cctiroe. By specifying a string of

kivuZs of words rather than a string of actual words, the rules allow us to assem-

ble

ne~~~ sentences on the fly and not regurgitate preassembled cliches—and

that allows us to convey unprecedented combinations of ideas. Though we

often speak of roses being red, we could talk about violets being red

if the

desire came over us (perhaps to announce a new hybrid), because the rule

allows us to insert violets into the N slot j

ust as easily as roses.

Second, the symbols contained by the rules are symbolic and hence abstract.

The rule doesn't say, "A sentence may begin with a bunch of words refer:inb to

a hind of flower"; rather, it

says, "A sentence may begin with an NP," where

NP is a symbol or variable that can be replaced by any noun, just as x or y in a

mathematical formula can be replaced by any number. Vve can use the rules to

talk about flowers and their colors and smells, but we can just as easily use

them to talk about karma or quarks or floob-boober-bab-boober-hubs (who, ac

-cording to Dr. Seuss, bounce in the water like blubbery tubs).

Third, the rules are combinatorial. They don't just have a single slot, like a

fill-

in-the-blank exam question; every position in the sentence offers a choice

of words from a lengthy menu. Say everyday English has four determiners (n,

any, on

e, and the) and ten thousand nouns. Then the rule for a noun phrase

al-

lows four choices for the determiner, f

ollowed by ten thousand choices for the

head noun, yi

elding 4 x 10,000 = 40,000 ways to utter a noun phrase. The rule

The Infinite Library ~

7

for a sentence allows these forty thousand subjects to be followed by any of

four thousand verbs, providing 40,000 x 4,000 = 160,000,000 ways to utter

the first three words of a sentence. Then there are four choices for the deter-

miner of the object (640 million four -word beginnings) followed by ten thou-

sand choices for the head noun of the object, or 640,000,000 x 10,000 =

6,400,000,000,000 (6.4 trillion) five -word sentences. Suppose it takes five

seconds to produce one of these sentences: To crank [hem a

ll out, f

rom The

abandovcment abased the abbey and T7ae abandonnze~~t abased the abbot, through

The abandoazment abased the zoologist, all the ~vay to The zoologist zoned the

zoo, would take a million years:

Nlany such combinations are ungrammatical of course, owing to various

complications I haven't mentioned—for example, you can't say T7ze Anron, a

abandonment, or The abbot abase the abbey. And most of the combinations are

nonsensical: Abandonments can't abbreviate, and abbeys can't abet. Yet even

with these restrictions the e,~pressive range of a grammar is astonishing. The

psychologist George Miller once conservatively estimated that if speakers keep

a sentence perfectly grammatical and sensible as they choose their words,

their menu at each point offers an average of about ten choices (at some

points there are many more than ten choices; at others, only one or two). %That

works out to one hundred thousand five-word sentences, one million sip-word

sentences, ten million seven-word sentences, and so on. A sentence of twenty

words is not at

all uncommon (the preceding sentence has twenty words be-

fore and so on), and there are about one hundred million trillion of them in En-

glish. For comparison, that is about a hundred times the number of seconds

since the birth of the universe.

Grammar is an example of a combinatorial system, in which a small inven-

tory of elements can be assembled by rules into an immense set of distinct ob-

jects. Combinatorial systems obey what Miller calls the Eacponential Principle:

The number of possib]e combinations meows exponentially (geometrically)

with the size of the combinations Combinatorial systems can generate incon-

ceivably vast numbers of products. Every kind of molecule in the universe is

assembled from ahundred-odd chemical elements; every protein building

block and

catalyst in the living world is assembled from just twenty amino

acids. Even when the number of products is smaller, a combinatorial system

can capture them all and provide enormous sa~~ings in storage space. Eight bits

define 23 = 256 distinct bytes, which is more than enough for all the numerals,

punctuation marks, and upper- and lowercase letters in our writing system.

This allows computers to be built out of id

enrical specks of silicon that can be

8 ~

Words an

d Ru

les

in jus

t tw

o st

ates

, ins

tead

of the dozens of pi

eces

of ty

pe that once filled ty

pe-

setters' ca

ses.

Billions of

years ago

life on Ear

th settled on a co

de in wh

ich a

string of three ba

ses in

a DNA molecule became the ins

truc

tion

for sel

ecti

ng

one amino ac

id when ass

embl

ing a pr

otei

n. There are fou

r kinds of bas

es, so a

thre

e-base string allows for 4 x 4 X 4 = 64 possibilities. T

hat is enough to giv

e

each of the twenty amino aci

ds it

s own str

ing,

with plenty le

ft ove

r for th

e start

and st

op ins

truc

tion

s th

at beg

in and

end the pro

tein

. Two bas

es would hav

e

been

too

few (4 x 4 = 16), f

our mo

re tha

n ne

eded

(4 x 4 x 4 x 4 = 256).

Perh

aps the most viv

id des

crip

tion

of the st

agge

ring

power of a combinator-

ial sy

stem

is in Jor

ge Lui

s Bo

rges

's sto

ry "The Lib

rary

of Babel."9

The lib

rary

is

a vast net

work

of galleries wi

th boo

ks composed of all the co

mbin

atio

ns of

twenty-two let

ters

, the comma, the period, and the spa

ce. Somewhere in th

e

libr

ary is a book tha

t contains the true hi

stor

y of

the fut

ure (including the

sto

ry

of you

r de

ath)

, a book of prophecy tha

t vi

ndic

ates

the act

s of every man in the

univ

erse

, an

d a book containing the cla

rifi

cati

on of the my

ster

ies of hum

anit

y.

People roamed the galleries in a fu

tile

search for th

ose te

xts from among the

unto

ld number of bo

oks wi

th fal

se versions of

eac

h re

vela

tion

, the millions of

facs

imil

es of a gi

ven book differing by a cha

ract

er, and, of course, the miles

and miles of gib

beri

sh. The narrator notes th

at eve

n when the

human species

hoes

ext

inct

, the li

brar

}; tha

t sp

ace of

combinatorial possibilities, wi

ll endure:

"ill

umin

ated

, so

lita

ry, infinite, perfectly mo

tion

less

, eq

uipp

ed with precious

volumes, use

less

, incorruptible, secret."

Tech

nica

lly,

Borges needn't have des

crib

ed the lib

rary

as "i

nfin

ite:

' At eighty

char

acte

rs a lin

e, forty lines a pag

e, and 410 pag

es a book, the number of

book

s is aro

und

10~~

soo,

000

or I

fol

lowe

d by

1.8

mil

lion

zeroes. That is

, to be

sure

, a very lar

ge number—there are

only 10%° particles in the vi

sibl

e uni-

vers

e—bu

t it is a fi

nite

number.

It is ea

sy to make a toy grammar tha

t is eve

n more pow

erfu

l than the

scheme tha

t ge

nera

tes The Lib

rary

of Ba

bel.

Suppose our

rule for the ve

rb

phrase is enriched to al

low a sentence (5) to

appear inside it,

as in I tol

d Mary

he was

a fo

ol, i

n wh

ich he was

a fo

ol comes after the object NP Mar

y:

VP

i~

V

NP

S

Now our

grammar is

rec

acrs

ive:

The rul

es create an

entity that can contain an

example of it

self

. In thi

s ca

se, a Se

nten

ce con

tain

s a Ve

rb Phr

ase which in

The In

fini

te Lib

rary

~ 9

turn can con

tain

a Sentence. An entity th

at contains an

exa

mple

of it

self

can

just

as ea

sily

contain an example of it

self

tha

t co

ntai

ns an example of

itself

that con

tain

s an

example of itself, and

so on:

/ \

NP

VP

i~

V

NP

S

NP

VP

i~

V

NP

S

/ \

NP

VP

i~~

V

NP

S

/ \

NP

VP

i~

V

NP

S

In thi

s case a sen

tenc

e can co

ntai

n a verb phrase, whi

ch can contain a sen

-tence, which can con

tain

a ver

b ph

rase

, wh

ich can co

ntai

n a se

nten

ce, ad in-

fini

tum.

For example, I think

I'll tel

l you th

at I jus

t read a news sto

ry tha

trecounts tha

t Stephen

Bril

l re

port

ed tha

t the pr

ess un

crit

ical

ly bel

ieve

d Ken-

neth

Sta

rr's

announcement tha

t Linda Tr

ipp

testified to him tha

t Monica

Lewinsky told Tripp th

at $ill Cl

into

n told Vernon Jo

rdan

to advise Lev~rinsky

not to

testify to Starr that she had

had

a sex

ual re

lati

onsh

ip wit

h Cl

into

n. That

stat

emen

t is a Rus

sian

doll with thirteen se

nten

ces in

side

sen

tenc

es-i

nsid

esentences. A rec

ursi

ve grammar can generate se

nten

ces of

any

length, and

thus

can

generate an

inf

init

e number of sentences. So a human being ossess-

bP

ing a recursive grammar can

exp

ress

or understand an infinite number of dis-

tinct th

ough

ts, limited in

pra

ctic

e on

ly by st

amin

a and mortality

10 ~

Wo

rds and

Rtii

les

~~

I

The idea that the cre

ativ

ity in

here

nt in la

ngua

ge can be e~cplained by a gra

m-

mar of combinatorial ru

les

is usu

ally

associated with the lin

guis

t Noam

Chomsky. Chomsky tra

ced the id

ea to Wilhelm von Humboldt, a nineteenth-

century pi

onee

r of

linguistics, who explained lan

guag

e as

"th

e infinite use of

fini

te media." Acc

ordi

ng to Chomsky, the idea is

even ol

der than that; Hum-

bold

t was the last in

a tradition of "C

arte

sian

lin

guis

ts" da

ting

back to the En-

lightenment.'

Enlightenment phi

loso

pher

s were cap

tiva

ted by the

dizzying ra

nge of

thou

ghts

made expressible by a com

bina

tori

al grammar. In his book The

Search for

the

Per

fect

Language the semiotician Umberto Eco recounts the

many Promethean schemes the

se phi

loso

pher

s came up with to

perfect and

i

harness their power.l~ Des

cart

es noticed tha

t the decimal system allows a

person to learn in

a day the names of all the quantities to infinity, and he sug

-

gested tha

t a universal art

ific

ial la

ngua

ge built on sim

ilar

principles could or-

ganize a

ll human thoughts. Leibniz, too, dreamed of a

univ

ersa

l logical

grammar that would gen

erat

e onl}~ valid sequences of ideas, banishing irra-

tionality and err

or forever.

Three hundred years lat

er we still are

fallible, and sti

ll take years to lea

rn a

Babel of local la

ngua

ges with [he

ir ten

s of

tho

usan

ds of ar

bitr

ary signs. Why

has no modern language used the

horsepower of

combinatorial grammar to the

fullest and abandoned the unp

rinc

iple

d, par

ochi

al, onerous-

to-memorize lau

n-

dry

list cal

led vo

cabu

lary

? The answer becomes clear when ~~~e look at th

e

most famous of the co

mbin

ator

ial schemes of the Enlightenment, the

philo-

soph

ical

lanwage of Bishop John Wilkins. The arbitrary name was an afF

ront

to VVilkins's se

nse of

good des

ign,

and he strove for a way to eliminate

it. He

wrote, "We sho

uld,

by lea

rnin

g ...the Nna

nes of thi

ngs,

be instructed likewise

in their Nat

ures

."

Wilkins's system, la

id out

in a le

ngth

y 166S opu

s, offered the user a noza-

arbi

trar

y name for

eve

ry thi

ng by div

idin

g th

e un

iver

se int

o ca

tego

ries

and

subc

ateg

orie

s and sub-subcategories, and assigning a vowel or consonant to

I:

every branch in the tre

e. The first syl

labl

e id

enti

fied

one of the forty Ca

te-

~I`

gories int

o which Wilkins had sorted

all th

inka

ble thoughts. For example, Z

stood fo

r "sensitive spe

cies

" (a

nima

ls).

and could be fol

lowe

d by i for "beasts"

f

(quadrupeds). The nex

t consonant picked ou

t a sub

divi

sion

; t, for

example,

stood fo

r ra

paci

ous terrestrial European canines. A fin

al vow

el pin

poin

ted th

e

species, yielding Zita as th

e name for

dog

s. By sim

ilar

computations one

The In

fini

te Library ~

I I

could deduce ano

ther

two thousand names for things. Zana is a scaly river

fish with reddish fl

esh,

in ot

her wo

rds,

salmon. Siba is a ty

pe of pu

blic

mil

i-ta

ry rel

atio

n, nam

ely,

defense. Deba is a portion of

the first of the te

rres

tria

lelements (fi

re),

to ~n

~t, fl

ame.

Coba is a con

sang

uino

us economic rel

atio

n of

direct asc

enda

nt, a.k.a. fat

her.

Wilk

ins'

s ph

ilos

ophi

cal language has

been ana

lyze

d in

sigh

tful

ly by Borges

and Eco, and we can see

why no one tod

ay spe

aks Wi

llis

h. ~'-

For one thing, it

forces use

rs to perform a chain of computations in their heads eve

ry time

they

want to refer to a dog. Ev

ery vowel and con

sona

nt is la

den with meaning

and act

s as

a premise in a le

ngth

enin

g de

duct

ion.

Spe

aker

s of the language

would have to

play a game of Twenty Que

stio

ns, in

ferr

ing an ent

ity from a de-

scription, for

every word in a sen

tenc

e. They cou

ld of course sim

ply memo-

rize the answers, such as th

at a portion of the first of

the terrestrial elements

is a fla

me, but that is

not much easier than memorizing that th

e word for

flam

e is

flnn

ae.

A second problem is th

at there are more things in heaven and earth than

were dreamt of in

Wil

kins

's philosophy, which ide

ntif

ied only two thousand

concepts. Wilkins understood the exponential principle and tried to cope with

the problem by len

gthe

ning

the wor

ds. He pro

vide

d su

ffix

es and connectors

that all

owed

cal

f, for

exa

mple

, to be e~tpressed as

cmv +young, and cutronomer

to be exp

ress

ed as artist +st

ar. But eventually he gave up and resorted to

using

synonyms for

con

cept

s hi

s la

ngua

ge cou

ld not

gen

erat

e, such as bo

x fo

r co

ffin

.Wilkins's dilemma was tha

t he cou

ld either expand his

sys

tem

to embrace all

conc

epts

, which would require even lo

nger

and more unwieldy st

ring

s, or he

coul

d fo

rce hi

s us

ers to remember the

nea

rest

synonym, rei

ntro

duci

ng the de-

spised memorization process.

A thud problem is that in a logical language words are

ass

embl

ed purely on

info

rmat

ion -

theoretic principles, with no regard to the problems that incar-

nate

creatuzes might have in pronouncing and und

erst

andi

ng the strings. A

perfect combinatorial la

ngua

ge is al

ways

in da

nger

of generating mou

thfu

lslike mxy

zptl

k or I~ftsplk, so Wilkins and other language -de

sign

ers of the En-

lightenment all had to make con

cess

ions

to pronounceability and euphony.

Sometrmes they defiled th

eir sy

stems with irregularities, for exa

mple

, revers-

ing avowel and consonant to make a word more pronounceable. At other

times th

ey hobbled the sys

tem with restrictions, such as that consonants and

vowels must alt

erna

te. Every even -numbered pos

itio

n in a word had to be

fill

ed by one of th

e nine vowels of En

glis

h_ and that rP

~rr;

~rA,

~ ,,,~,,.. ,.

..«,.

12

Words and Rules

gories, such as species in a genus, to nine apiece, regardless of how many

species exist in the world.

Another problem

is that Wilkins's words are .packed tight with information

and lack the safety factor provided by redundancy The slightest slip of the

tongue or pen guarantees misunderstanding. Eco catches Wilkins himself mis-

using Gade (barley) for Gape (tulip).

Finally, all that power is not being put to any sensible use. The beauty of a

combinatorial system is that it Generates combinations that have never before

been considered but that one might want to talk about some day. For exam-

ple, the combinatorial system known as the periodic table of the elements in-

spired chemists to look for hitherto unknown chemical elements that should

have occupied the empty slots in the table. Combinatorial grammar allows us

to talk about a combinatorial world, a world in which violets could be red or a

man could bite a dog. Yet familiar objects and actions around us often form a

noncombinatorial list of distinctive kinds. When we merely have to single out

one of them, a combinatorial system

is overkill. We never will have to refer to

fish with an enmity to sheep or to military actions with scales and reddish

flesh, and that's what a combinatorial, system for words like Wilkins's allows

us to do. To refer to everyday things it s easier to say dog or fi

sh than

to work

through a complicated taxonomy that is just a fancy way of singling out dogs

or fish anywa}c

The languages of Wilkins and other Enlightenment thinkers show that combi-

natorial grammar has disadvantages as well as advantages, and that illuminates

our understanding of the design of human language. No language works like

Wilkins's contraption, with every word compiled out of meaningful vowels and

consonants according to a master formula_ All languages force their speakers

to memorize thousands of arbitrary words, and now we can see why.1

3 Nlany

bodily organ systems are made from several kinds of tissue optimized for jobs

with contradictory specifications. Our eyes have rods for night vision and

cones for day vision; our muscles have slow-twitch fibers for sustained action

and fast-twitch fibers for bursts of speed. The human language system also ap-

pears to be built out of two kinds of mental tissue. It has a leacicon of words,

which refer to common things such as people, places, objects, and actions,

and which are handled by a mechanism for storing and retrieving items in

memory. And it has a grammar of rules, which refer to novel relationships

The Infinite Library

~ 13

amonb things, and which is handled by a mechanism for combining and ana-

1}~zing s

equences of symbols.

To a parsimonious scientific mind, however, two mental mechanisms can be

one too many. The poet Wiliiam Empson wrote of the Latin philosopher,

Lucretius could not credit centaurs;

Such bicycle he deemed asynchronous.

14

Today's skeptics also might wonder about atwo-part design for language. Per-

haps words and rules are two modes of operation of a single faculty. Simple, fa

-miliar thoughts need short noises, which we call words, and complicated,

unfamiliar thoughts need long noises, which we call phrases and sentences. A

single machine might make either short or long noises, depending on the kinds

of thoughts it is asked to express. Or perhaps there is a gradual continuum be-

tween memory and combination rather than two distinct mechanisms, with

words at the memory end of the continuum and sentences at the combination

end. To show that words and rules are handled by different machines we need to

hold the input anc~ output of the putative machines constant. We need side

-by -side specimens in which the same hind of thought is packed into the same

kind of verbiage, but one specimen shows the handiwork of a word regurgita-

tor and the other shows the handiwork of a rule amalgamator. I believe that

languages do provide us with such specimens. They are called regular and ir-

regular words.

English verbs come in two flavors. Regular verbs have past tense forms that

look like the verb with -ed on the end: Today I j

og, yesterday I j

ogged. They are

monotonously predictable: j

og jogged, waUz—wniked, play%played, kiss—kissed,

and so on. (

Regular nouns, whose plurals end in -s, such as cats and dogs, are

similar.) The list of regular verbs is also open-ended. There are thousands, per-

haps tens of thousands, of regular verbs in English (depending on. how big a

dictionary you consult), and new ones are being added to the language

all the

rime. When fc

~z came into common parlance a decade or so ago, no one had to

inquire about its past-tense form; everyone knew it vas f

c:xed. Similarly, when

other words enter the language such as Spam (flood with E-mail), snarf (down-

load afile), mung (damage something), nzosh (dance in roughhouse fashion),

and Bork (challenge a

political nominee for partisan reasons), the past-tense

forms do not need s

eparate introductions: We a

ll deduce that they are

spnmmed, sf

xarfed, nzzinged, noshed, and

Borleecl.

l4 ~

Words and Rules

Even young children do it. In 1958 the psychologist Jean Berko Gleason

tested four- to seven-year-old children with the following procedure, now

known as the wiig-test:

•

This is

a wug.

s

•

Now there is another one.

There are two of them.

These are t~vo

The children could have refused to answer on the grounds that they had never

heard of a wug and had never been told how to talk about more than one of

them. Instead, Serko Gleason wrote, "Answers were willingly, and often insis-

tently, b ven." Three-quarters of the preschoolers and 99 percent of the first-

graders filled in the blank with ti

inc~s. Similarly, when shown a picture of a man

who I:nows how to ricl or Bing or filing and did the same thing yesterday, most

children said that he ricked or binged or glinged.

The children could not have heard their parents say u~

tiigs or binged before

entering the lab, because these words had been coined especially for the exper-

iment. Children therefore are not parrots who just play back what they hear.

And the children could not have been previously rewarded by parents for utter-

ing those forms, because the children did not know the words before entering

the lab. Children therefore are not like pigeons in a Skinner boa, who increase

or decrease the frequency of responses in reaction to the contingencies of rein-

forcement. Noam Chomsky and Eric Lenneberg, pioneers of the modem study

The Infinite Library

~ 15

of language and contemporaries of Berko Gleason in the Harvard-NIIT com-

munity, pointed to children's ability to generalize construcrions such as the reg-

ularpast tense in support of their theory that language is actively acquired by a

special rule-forming mechanism in the mind of the child.~>

As it happens, al

l children are subjects in a version of Berko Gleason's ex-

periment. Children often make up words or mangle them and are happy to put

their ne~v verbs in the past tense. Here are some examples:

spidered

lightninged

smunched

poonked

speeched

broomed

byed (went by)

eat lunched

cut -upped e~~b

All children also make creative errors in their speech like these:

I buyed a fire dog for a grillion dollars.

Hev Horton heated a Who.

My teacher bolded the baby rabbits and we patted them.

Daddy I stealed some of the people out of the boat.

Once upon a time a alligator was eating a dinosaur and the dinosaur

vas eating the alligator and the dinosaur was eaten by the alliga-

tor and the alligator goed kerplunk. t-

Such errors bring us to the second flavor of a verb in English: irregular. The

past-tense form of an irregular verb

is not simply the verb decorated with an

-ecl ending. For example, the past tense of ]ncy is not bayed, but boaight. Simi-

larly, the past tense of hear, hold, st

eal, and go are heard, held, st

ole, and went.

Inewlar verbs contrast ~~ith reb lar verbs in almost every way. Whereas reb

ulars are orderly and predictable, irregulars are chaotic and idiosyncratic. The

past tense of sink is sanl ,and the past tense of ri

tag is rang. But the past tense

of cl

iszg is not clang, but clacng. The past tense of think is neither thai2l nor

thitnk, but thought. And the past tense of blink is neither blank nor blunt nor

bloicght, but a regular form, blinked. The language maven Richard Lederer

wrote a poem, "Tense Times with Uerbs," that beb ns

:

16 ~

Wo

rds and Ru

les

The ver

bs in En

glis

h ar

e a fright.

How can we lea

rn to read and write?

Today we spe

ak, bu

t first we spo

ke;

Some faucets lea

k, but

never lok

e.

Today we write, bu

t first we wro

te;

We bit

e ou

r to

ngue

s, but never bot

e.

Each day I tea

ch, fo

r years I taught,

And pre

ache

rs pre

ach,

but nev

er praught.

This tale I

tell; th

is tal

e I told;

I smell the fl

ower

s, but nev

er smold.

If knights sti

ll slay, as once they sl

ew,

Then do we play, as once we plew?

If I sti

ll do as once I did

,

Then do cows moo, as they once mid? ~ 6

Also

in co

ntra

st to the re

gula

rs, irregular ve

rbs form a closed

list. There are

only about 150 to 180 irregular verbs in modern Eng

lish

(depending on how

you cou

nt),

and the

re have been no rec

ent additions.

79 The youngest ir

regu

lar

is pro

babl

y snuck, which sneaked int

o the language ove

r a century ago and is

still not accepted by pur

ists

.'-0 And the freewheeling children in Berko Gle

a-

son's study were downright stodgy when it came to ir

regu

lar fo

rms:

Only one

out of

eig

hty-

six turned Bin

g into ban

g, and one oth

er turned fi

ling

int

o gl

ang.

'-1

These dif

fere

nces

sugbest a simple th

eory

. Regular past-tense forms are pre-

dict

able

in sound and gen

erat

ed fre

ely because th

ey are

products of

a rul

e that

live

s in the minds of ch

ildr

en and adu

lts:

"The pas

t te

nse of a ver

b may be

formed from the ver

b fo

llow

ed by the

suf

fix -e

d:' The rule would look ju

st like

the rules of

syn

tax in the toy

grammar we played with earlier,

past

/ \

V

suffix

and would generate a si

mila

r in

vert

ed-tree-like str

uctu

re:

Upast

V

suff

ix

walk

-ed

The In

fini

te Library

~ 17

Irregular verbs, in co

ntra

st, are unpredictable in form and res

tric

ted to a lis

tbecause they are memorized and ret

riev

ed as in

divi

dual

words. An irregular

form would loo

k ju

st like th

e lexical en

try we saw when considering the name

of the ros

e. It would be linked with the entry for

the pla

in form of the same

verb

and lab

eled

as

its pa

st tense:

hold

held

soun

d: hol

d so

und:

held

meaning: ~

meaning: r~

part of speech: V

part

of speech: V

tense: pas

t

Two mechanisms trying to do the same job

would get

in each oth

er's

way un-

less something adj

udic

ated

between them, and the

re is in

deed

a simple pr

inci

-pl

e: If a word can pro~~ide it

s own past tense from memory, the rule is

blocked;

elsewhere (by default), the

rule

appl

ies.

'-'-

The fir

st part e,

~pla

ins why we adults

don't say bo

lded

and stealed; ou

r knowledge of held and stole blo

cks the rule

that would have added -ed

. The second part e~tplains why bot

h children and

adul

ts say

Borl ed and nzoshed and ricl ed and bro

omed

; as long as a ver

b does

not ha

ve a form in memory, the rul

e maybe app

lied

. The abi

lity

of a ru

le to ap

-ply elsewkere or by default—that is

, to

any word that does not

alr

eady

have a

specified form in memory—is the

source of

its po

wer.

A speaker who needs to

express a past tense or pl

ural

is never left speechless, even when a search in

memorg comes up emptyhanded.

The theory th

at regular forms are

gen

erat

ed by rul

e and irr

egul

ar forms are

retr

ieve

d by rot

e is

ple

asin

g no

t on

ly bec

ause

it explains the

dif

fere

Ttce

s in

pro-

duct

ivit

y between the two patterns but als

o because it Fits nicely in

to the

larg

er pic

ture

of the design of language.

At first gla

nce ir

regu

lar verbs would seem to have no reason to liv

e. Whv

shou

ld lan

guag

e have forms that ar

e ju

st cus

sed ex

cept

ions

to a ru

le? What are

they

good for

, besides gi

ving

chi

ldre

n a way to make cut

e er

rors

, pr

ovid

ing

mate

rial

for

humorous verse, and making lif

e miserable fo

r foreign language

stud

ents

? In Woody Allen's story "The Kugelmass Epi

sode

" a hu

mani

ties

pro-

fessor in a mi

dlif

e cr

isis

finds a magic cab

inet

that projects him int

o any book

he tak

es in with him. Aft

er a tempestuous aff

air with Madame Bovary, Kugel-

mass tries again with another no

vel,

but thi

s time the

cab

inet

malfunctioned,

and the pro

fess

or "was pro

ject

ed into an old

te:

ctbo

ok, Remedial Spa~aisl2, and

was running for

his

lif

e over a barren, rocky terrain as th

e word ten

er (`t

ohave')—a large and hairy irregular verb—raced after him nn

its sn

;,,r

il~ i

PQ~ "'3

1 S

~ Wo

rds and

Rifl

es

But un

der the wo

rd-and

-rul

e theory we need no

t su

ppos

e th

at evolution fit-

ted us wit

h a sp

ecia

l gadget for irregularity. Irr

egul

ar for

ms are

jus

t words. If

our la

ngua

ge faculty has a knack for memorizing wo

rds,

it sho

uld have no in

hi-

biti

ons about me

mori

zing

pas

t-tense fo

rms at

the same tim

e. These are

the

verb

s we cal

l ir

regu

lar,

and

they ar

e a mere 1S0 add

itio

ns to a me

ntal

lex

icon

that

alr

eady

num

bers

in the te

ns or hundreds of thousands. Ir

regu

lar and regu-

lar fo

rms therefore wo

uld be the

inevitable outcome of two men

tal subsys-

tems, words and rules, tr

ying

to do the same thi

ng, name

ly, express an

eve

nt or

state that too

k place in the past.

Regular and ir

regu

lar fo

rms th

row a spotlight on the advantages an

d di

sadv

an-

tages of

wor

ds and

rules, because ev

eryt

hing

else about them is th

e sa

me: They

both

are

one word lo

ng, an

d bo

th convey the same mea

ning

, pa

st ten

se. The ad-

vantage of

a rule

is tha

t a va

st number of fo

rms are generated by

a com

pact

mech

anis

m. In English the savings ar

e si

gnif

ican

t. The rul

es for -ed

, -s,

and

-in

g

(the

thr

ee reg

ular

for

ms of th

e verb) cut.our mental storage heeds to a quarter of

what they would be if e

ach fo

rm had

to be

sto

red se

para

tely

. In other languages,

such as Tu

rkis

h, Ban

tu, a

nd many Native Am

eric

an languages, t

here

can

be hu

n-

dreds, tho

usan

ds, or eve

n mi

llio

ns of co

njug

ated

for

ms for every ver

b (f

or differ-

ent combinations of te

nse,

per

son,

. number, gender, mood, ca

se, an

d so on), an

d

the sa

~rin

gs are

ind

ispe

nsab

le. The rule also allows new wor

ds lik

e mosh, rare

words li

ke abase, and abstract words lik

e abet to be sup

plie

d with a past tense

(nao

slae

d, aba

sed,

abet

ted)

, even if there we

re no pr

evio

us opportunities for the

speaker an

d he

arer

to have committed the for

m to

memory. On the other han

d, a

rule

is mo

re powerful than needed for wo

rds we heaz so

often that retrieval fro

m

memory is ea

sy. As we sha

ll see, it

is th

e most common ver

bs, such as be, hc

eve,

do, go,

and say

, that tum out

to be irr

egul

ar in language aft

er lan

guag

e.

Rules have another shortcoming tha

t in

vite

s the word system to memorize

irre

gula

rs. Re

call

tha

t one of the nuisances pl

agui

ng John Wilkins as he de-

sign

ed his

per

fect language was tha

t fl

esh-and-

blood humans had to pro-

nounce and understand the pr

oduc

ts of the ru

les.

A sequence of sounds tha

t

encodes a concept pr

ecis

ely an

d efficiently may be unresolvable by the ear or

unpronounceable b}

' the ton

gue.

So it

is wit

h th

e rule for the past tense in En-

glish. The delicate tongue

-tap

tha

t gr

aces

the end

of a regular form may esc

ape

a listener and be om

itte

d when he re

prod

uces

it, res

ulti

ng in a so

leci

sm such

as sup

pose

to,

use to,

or cut and dry, or in signs and in

scri

ptio

ns lik

e th

ese:

Broil Cod

Use Books

The

hxfi

nite

Library

19

Whip Cream

Blac

ken redfish

Can Veg

etab

les

Bor sets

Handicap Fac

ilit

ies Available

In certain older exp

ress

ions

-ed was omi

tted

so of

ten th

at the

e~c

pres

sion

even-

tual

ly lost th

e -e

d al

toge

ther

, even among careful speakers and li

sten

ers.

That's

how ~t~e en

ded up with ice cr

eam (o

rigi

nall

y iced cream), so

tiu~ cream, mince

meat, and DanaTz Yankees.-'' Irregular verbs, in co

ntra

st, tend to use vowel

changes such as ri

tzy rang, st

rilze—struck, and b1o

u~—b

lew,

which are

as cl

ear as

a bell.

Simi

larl

y, the ver

y ob

livi

ousn

ess to

the det

ails

of the ve

rb that ma

kes a ru

leso po~~~erfi.tl (

it applies acr

oss the board to

all

verbs, wh

ethe

r they are familiar

soun

ding

or not) can let

it blindly jam a suf

fix onto the

end of an inh

ospi

tabl

esound. The result can be an uneuphonious ton

gue-

tv~r

iste

r such as ed

ited

or

sixths. Monstrosities like these are nev

er found among the

irr

egul

ars,

which all

have sta

ndar

d Anglo-Sakon word sounds such as grew and str

ode and clu

~zg,

which please th

e ea

r and roll off th

e to

ngue

.'-'

Language works by words and rul

es, each with strengths and ~~~

eakn

esse

s.Irregular and reg

ular

ver

bs are

contrasting specimens of words and rules in go

-ti

on. These are

the themes of this book, but with many twists to come. It

would be too good to be true if we reached a maj

or con

clus

ion about the most

comp

lica

ted object in th

e I:nown uni

vers

e, the

human brain, si

mply

by see

ing

how children name pic

ture

s of

litt

le bir

ds. The word -an

d-rule the

ory fo

r regu-

lar and irregular ver

bs is an ope

ning

statement in the la

test

round of a debate

on ho~v th

e mind ~vo

rls th

at has

raged for

cen

turi

es. It

has

ins

pire

d two alter-

native the

orie

s that are equ

ally

ingenious but

diametrically opposed, and in-

tens

ive

research showing what is

right

and

v~~rong

about each of

them—perhaps res

olvi

ng the deb

ate fo

r good. The the

ory has sol

ved many

puzz

les about the Eng

lish

lan

guag

e, and has

illuminated the ways tha

t chil-

I, dr

en lea

rn to ta

lk, th

e fo

rces

that make languages diverge and the for

ces th

atmake them alike, t

he way tha

t la

ngua

ge is processed in the bra

in, and even th

eI

natu

re of ou

r concepts about things and peo

ple.

But to reach th

ose condu-

sion

s we fir

st must put reg

ular

and irregular ver

bs under a more pow

erfu

l mag-

nify

ing glass, where we will find some unexpected fingerprints.

2

j ~

egular and irregular words have long served as metaphors for the law-

abiding and the quirky. Psychology textbook point to children's errors

I like breal ed and goecl as evidence that we are apattern-loving, exception-

hating species, e~cplaining everything from why children have trouble learning

simple laws of physics to why adults make errors when using computers or di-

agnosing diseases. In 1984 George Orwell has the state banning irregular

verbs as a sign of its determination to crush the human spirit; in 1989 the

writer of a personal ad in the Neiv York Review of Books asked, "Are you an ir-

regular verb?" as a sign of her determination to exalt it.

~; Science is not always I:ind to fo111ore from the natural world. Elephants do

forget, lemmings don't commit mass suicide, two snowflakes can be alike, we

use more than 5 percent of our brains, and Eskimos don't have a hundred

words for snow We had better give irregular and regular verbs a closer look be-

fore using them as evidence for a language faculty that works by words and

rules, or more generally, a mind that works by lookup and computation.

'~ Regular anduregular forms do not work in isolation; they are part of the in-

tegrated living system we call a language. This chapter will tease out regular

inflection from the linguistic organs and tissues in which it is

embedded. The

next chapter, on irregular verbs, will have a different feel. Living creatures can

be dissected, but creatures dead so long that only a trace of the living organs

21

23 ~

Wo

rds and Ru

les

remain must be excavated. Our tour of

the irregular ver

bs wil

l uncover them

from layers of

his

tori

cal sediment lai

d down ove

r th

ousa

nds of

yea

rs.

Does language even luive an anatomy? Many peo

ple th

ink about la

ngua

ge in

the fo

llow

ing way: We need to communicate, and lan

guag

e is

the fulfillment of

that

need. For every ide

a there is

a word and vic

e-ve

rsa,

and we utt

er the

words in an ord

er that re

flec

ts the

con

nect

ions

among ideas. If thi

s common-

sens

e view is tr

ue, th

ere would be little need to speak of la

ngua

ge bei

ng a com-

plex

sys

tem.

The com

plex

ity would res

ide in the

meanings, and language

would reflect that co

mple

xity

dir

ectl

y.

The point of th

is cha

pter

is to show that this vietiv is

mistaken. I ~n

~ill

put reb

ular ver

bs under a microscope to

reveal the delicate anatomy that makes them

~vork.'Language do

es express meaning as sound, of course, bu

t no

t in

a single

step. Sentences are put together on an assembly lin

e composed of mental

modules, shown on the fol

lo~~

ing pa

ge. One is a st

oreh

ouse

of memorized

word

s, the mental le.~icon. Another is a team of rules that combine words and

part

s of

words into bier ~n~ords, a component cal

led ~r

zarp

holo

gy. A thi

rd is a

team of ru

les th

at combine words int

o phrases and sentences, a component

called syntc~~. The thr

ee components pass messages about meaning back and

forth with the res

t of

the mind so th

at the words correspond to what the

speaker wants to say. This in

terf

ace between lan

guag

e and mind is called se-

naantics. Finally, the assembled wor

ds, ph

rase

s, and sentences are

massaged by

a se

t of

rules int

o a sound pattern that we can pronounce when speaking or ex-

trac

t from the stream of

noi

se when lis

teni

ng. Th

is interface between language

and the mouth and ear

is called phonology.

Many people are suspicious ofbox-and-arrow diagrams of

the mind. The

walls of

the boxes and the

pat

hs of the arrows oft

en seem arbitrary, and cou

ld

just

as easily have been drawn dif

fere

ntly

. In the case of

lan

guag

e, how

ever

,

thes

e components pop out as we tease apa

rt the phenomena, and at least

some of the di

visi

ons are now becoming visible in the li

ving

brain, as

eve wil

l

see in

chapter 9.1 Thi

s chapter wi

ll e,~

cplo

re the

kin

ds of discoveries that have

led li

ngui

sts to div

ide la

ngua

ge int

o parts, usi

ng onl

y th

e fa

cts of

reg

ular

and ir-

regular words. Fir

st, we will se

e why the

lex

icon

is di

ffer

ent from the two

boxe

s of

rules to the ri

ght,

then why morphology is in

a different box from syn

-

tat,

and fin

ally

, why phonology and sem

anti

cs each gets a bo

x.

The eas

iest

boxes to keep separate ought to be the

box

es containing words and

rules. From the discussion in the preceding chapter, it

should be clear tha

t a

Diss

ecti

on by Linguistics

~ 23

D4ou

th and Ear

s

2

Phon

olog

y(r

u]es

that de

fine

the sound pattern

of a language)

Lexicon

Morphology

Syntae

(sto

red en

trie

s ,_~

(rul

es for

for

ming

__,~,

(rul

es for

for ~+cords,

comp

lex wo

rds,

forming phrases

including irregulars)

including re

gula

rs)

and sentences)

Semantics

(mea

ning

s ex

pres

sed

through language)

1Beliefs an

d De

sire

s

simp

le ~~~ord like duck belongs in the lexicon to the left in

the dia

gram

. Just as

clea

rly,

a sen

tenc

e li

ke Daf

fy is a duc

l~ is

ass

embl

ed by the

rules of syntax in th

ebox on the

rig

ht. A

ccor

ding

to th

e ~n~ords-and-rules theory, in

e~ul

ar forms such

as swarrz are al

so words that come from the lex

icon

, because th

ey are

as ar

bi-

trary as dud

z. lA~

hat do we do the

n ~d

th reg

ular

forms lik

e ga

iack

ed? They look

like words and sound lik

e words, but

I have been insisting they don't have to

be sto

red in the

lexicon. They don't seem lik

e wo

rds,

but the}' don't seem like

sent

ence

s ei

ther

, which are

the cle

ares

t products of rules.

The problem is that the

ter

ms word and rule come from eve

ryda

y pa

rlan

ce and

are as

sci

enti

fica

lly fuzzy as oth

er vernacular te

rms,

like

~nc

g and rocH. On closer

exam

inat

ion,

the word word has

t~v

o ve

ry different sen

ses.

'- The first sense

matc

hes the ev

eryd

ay not

ion of

a wor

d: a stretch of sound that eg

ress

es a con-

cept, that is p

rint

ed as a string of le

tter

s between white spa

ces,

and that may be

combined with other wo

rds to form phr

ases

and sen

tenc

es. Some of these wo

rds

are st

ored

who

le in th

e lexicon, li

ke duck and su~ana; others ar

e assembled out of

24

~ Words acrd Rccles

,smaller bit

s by rules of morphology such as

q~iacl~ecl and dLi

clz-

bill

ed platy

ties

. A

technical term for a word in this sense is a nzor~hological object, to

be distin-

guished from phrases and sentences, which are syntactic objects.

The second sense of word is a stretch of sound that has to be memorized be-

cause

it cannot be generated by rules. Some- memorized chunks are smaller

than a word in the first sense, such as prefixes like un- and re- and suffices like

-able and -ed. Others are larger than a ~sord in the

first sense, such as idioms,

cliches, and collocations. Idioms are phrases whose meanings cannot be com-

puted out of their parts, such as eat yozar heart out and beat around the bush.

Collocations and cliches are strings of ~~~ords that are remembered as wholes

and often used together, such as gone with the wind or like two peas in a pod.

People know tens of thousands of these expressions; the linguist Ray Jackend-

off refers to them as "the Wheel of Fortune lexicon," after the game show in

which contestants guess a familiar expression from a few fragments. A chunk

o£ any size that has to be memorized—prefix, su

ffix, whole word, idiom, co

llo-

cation—is the second sense of word. It is the sense of word that contrasts with

rule, and the sense I had in mind when choosing the

title of this book. A mem-

orized chunk is sometimes called a

liste~~ze, that is, an item

that has to be

memorized as part of a list; one could argue that this book ought to have been

called Listenaes arul Rules.

So walked

is a word in the

first sense (a morphological object) and not a

word in the second sense (a listeme); its listemes are tival~ and -ecl. These

one-

part listemes—prefixes, suffixes, and the stems they attach to, such as

walk—are called morphemes, a term coined by the nineteenth-century lin-

guist Baudouin de Courtenay to refer to "that part of a word which is en-

dowed with psychological autonomy and is for the very same reasons not

further divisible."3

What about the rules? Why divide the rules of morphology, which build com-

plex words (including regular plurals and past-tense forms), from the rules of

syntax, which build phrases and sentences? Both are productive, recursive,

combinatorial systems, and some linguists see them as two parts of a larger

system.`'Yet all linguists recognize that they are not identical. This may seem

of no interest to anyone but a student cramminb for a Linguistics 101 final,

but in fact it has been a source of countless barroom arguments, late-night

dorm-

room debates, and irreconcilable differences.

Dissection by Linguistics

~ 25

What is the correct word for people who pass by: pcuserbys or passersby? Do

nervous fiancees dread the first meeting of the mother-in-laws or the n2others-

in-law> Who did Richard Nixon force to resign: a series of Attorney Generals,

or a series of At

torneys General? Here are a few real -

life examples:

Dear Ms. Grammar,

A member of the Fr

iday

Night Couples League ... had a hole in one on [he thi

rdhole and another on the fifrh. Did he have two holes in one or

two hole in ones?

One of us bel

ieve

s that the pattern should be the same as in attorne}~s general

and passersb~~. The other disagrees, believing that holes in one would indicate

that the golfer gained multiple holes in one shot. A Diet Coke has been wagered

on [his, and we have ab eed that Ms. Grammar sha11 be the final authorihcs

SPOONFULS

From a recipe: "Now throw in nuo tablespoons ful

l of chopped parsley and cook

ten minutes more. The quail ought to be tender by then." Never mind the quail;

how are we ever going to get those tablespoons tender? The word, of course, is

tablespoonfi~Is, no matter how illoa cal it seems. One dictionary contains the en-

try sp

oons

ful,

but phis is not generally accepted b

Gin and tonic season (no hyphens, please) is just about finished, but Joe Gale-

ota of West Roxbury would still like to know how to order when he's having more

than one. "

Friends advised me that the answer is 'd ns and tonic' because alcohol

is the main ingredient," he writes.%

Never has the U,S. faced a worse crisis than in 1887, afrer the invention of the

Jack

-in -the-Box. It had become a fad overnight, and everyone was having a

whale of a time when someone asked, "What is its plural?" "Jack

-in -the -Boxes!"

claimed some. Others hotly insisted, "J

acks-in-the-BoxP' Civil war seemed in-

evitable, when Zeke Kelp's Crusade won a compromise on "Jacks-

in-the-Boxes."

Unthanked for forty-three years, Kelp will be honored next week when N. 1.

City unveils a hydrant in his name s

All right, the last example isn't from real life; it

's from the Early Cartoons and

Writing of Dr. Seuss. The others are from well-known language columnists.

Hole

-in-one is from Ms. Grammar, th

e nom de plume of Barbara Walraff when

presiding over "Word Court" in

the Atlantic Monthly. Spoonful i

s from

Theodore Bernstein, the late New York Tinxes editor who wrote the syndicated

26 ~

Words and Riles

column "Bernstein on Words." Gin'and tonic is from Jan Freeman, who dis-

penses "The Ward" in

the Boston Globe.

People disagree on how to pluralize nouns, and they care about who is cor-

rect. Purists insist that the -s belongs on the noun in the middle of the expres-

sion (~zotaries publiq r

unners-zi.p), and those with the common touch are

content to leave it at the end (notar}~ pti+blics, runner-ups). "Ms. Grammar" ad-

vised her beseechers that holes in one is technically correct, but added,'"to say

`two holes in one' is

to ask to be misunderstood." Her Solomonic suggestion

was to say a Bole in one

ti.vice, and to buy t~vo Diet Cokes.

For my purpose—figuring out how the human mind deals with language—

there is no correct answer. Most disputes about "correct' usage are questions of

custom and a

uthority rather than g

rammatical logic (see "The Language

Mavens" in my book Tie Langiin~e Instinct), and in these disputes in parricular,

both parties have b ammatical logic on their side. Their agony highlights the dis-

tinctions among lexicon, morphology, and syntax, and illustrates the theme of

this book: that the mind analyzes every stretch of language as some mixture of

memorized chunks and rule-governed assemblies. How people pluralize an ex-

pression depends on how they tacitly analyze

it: a

s a word or as a phrase.

With a simple word the plural suffix goes at the end: one ~iri, t

~vo girls. Now

what happens in a compound word composed of t~vo simple words, such as cr

n~~-

girl? The plural

still goes on the end: tivo cowgirls, not tivo cmvsgirl ar tu~o cows-

girls. That is because the word,oirl inside crnvgirl is special. It

is called the head of

the word, and it stands for the word as a whole in determining its meaning (a

cowe 1 i

s a kind of girl) and in determining its plural: The -s

Goes on gi

rl. A

pl2rase

also has a head, and it too determines the meaning and gets the plural. b'ut now

~-ve discover the major difference between a word, the product of morpholow,

and a phrase, the product of syntax: In the phrase, the head is on the left, not the

right. If you meet more than one girl from Ipanema (head =girl), they are girls

front Ipnnenaa, not girl fr

o~~z I~anenxas. With a word the plural is

on the end (c

rnv-

girls); v

~~ith a phrase the plural can be in the middle (g

irls front I~asaenuz).9

The seeds of the mother-iss-Iativ dispute were sown by a special option of En-

glish: Occasionally a phrase gets repackaged into a long word. For example, a

hangover victim may complain of a bottorix-of-the-birdcage taste in her mouth;

the phrase bottom of th

e I~irdcnge has been packaged as a word that modifies

taste. When aword-made-from-a-phrase

is new and fresh, speakers still can

perceive the anatomy of the phrase inside the word. For example, we parse the

modifier bottom-

of-the-birdcage to understand that it means something as foul

as the bottom of a birdcage.

Dissectiotx I~~ L

inguistics

~ ?7

But when the phrase is used as a ti~ord repeatedly, the original meaning can

recede from

collective memory. The phrase boundaries melt into a glob, and

speakers no longer sense its parts. No one thinks of Thacrsclay as Tlzor's Da~~

anymore, or of breakfast as hrenlzing

cz fa

st. Modern English has thousands of

former phrases and complex words that have congealed into what people no~~

perceive as simple words, such as

bztsiness (busyness), Christnxas (Christ's

Mass), and spinster (one who spins). The meltdown, of course, does not hap-

pen o~~ernight or in

all speakers at once; there must have been a time when

some English speakers

still heard

Christti~acu as Christ's Mass and others heard

it as the arbitrary name of the holiday, ju

st as today's older speakers hear the

awe in awesome where younger speakers hear the whole word as a synonym for

good.

Most of our disputed plurals originated as phrases and then became words.

Long ago people might have thought, "she is not my mother

i~a reality; she is

only my mother in law" (that is, according to canon or Church law). But the

concept of a spouse's mother needs a word, and eventually the phrase got re-

analyzed as that word: "She is my mother-in-lmv." Similar meltdowns occurred

in these phrases:

Jack is in the boy —~ That is

a Jacl -in-the-box.

Phyllis completed that hole in one shot —+ She got ahole-in-ofze.

Barry passed by --

~ He is a passerby.

I set aside a spoon full of parsley —; I set aside a s~oonfi.cl.

If some speakers

still hear the phrase inside the word, they will be tempted to

put the plural marker on the head of the phrase: two mother +sin law, Jack + s

in a box, hole +sin one, pcuser + s Ir

}; spoon + s fu

ll. But if s

peakers glom the

words together in their minds, they will be tempted to put the plural marker at

the end: nz

otheri~xlcrw + s,

jnckinthel~ox + es, pa

sser]r~~ + s, holeinone + s,

spoon-

f241 -F S.

It's not that phrase hearers interpret these expressions literally (for example,

that amother-in-law is a mother as recognized by the law), or that the phrase-

deaf treat them as any old string of consonants and vowels; both surely recob

nine them as complex words built out of familiar words. It

's just that they grow

different kinds of connective tissue when piecing these e;cpressions together.

Those who would describe themselves as sons-in-lativ hear mother as the head

of a phrase inside the word (shown in the left tree in the diagram); those who

28 ~

Words and Rules

.would describe themselves as son-

in-laws hear a string of li

ttle words inside

the big word (right tree): N

N

NP

N

P N I

N

pP

mother i

n law

I / \

mother P

NP

I in

law

A proof that the in-iaw e~tpressions have congealed into words maybe found in

the umbrella word in-law, which can stand alone and be pluralized in the

usual way: The in-laws are conning over. It is a good bet that many of today's

commonly used phrases will also become opaque some day and turn into

words; the giveaway will be a plural at the end. Don't be surprised if one day

you hear about grant-in-aids, bill of ladings, or woriz, of

ans.

This ambiguity—one stretch of sound, two ways of building a tree in the

mind—also started the controversy raised by reports such as the following:

While Mo Vaughn should finish well over 300 with close to 40 home runs and

more than 100 RBIs, Mike Piazza has not been producing anywhere close to

what he did las[ season, when he

hit .362 with 40 homers and 124 RBIs.1

0

Baseball purists who deplore a

rtificial turf and the designated

hitter get

equally incensed by the plural form RBIs. RBI is

an acronym for run batted in,

a run scored by a teammate as a consequence of one's batting the ball. An RBI

and then another RBI are two runs batted in, and the acronym for runs batted

in is just RBI—so it should be I24 RBI, not 124 RBIs. (The purists are not

mollified by the sportscasters' common alternative, ribbies.) But the purists fail

to recognize that acronyms, like phrases, can [urn into bona fide words as a

language evolves, as in TV, VCR, UFO, SOB, and PC. Once an acronym has

become a word there is no reason not to treat it

as a word, including adding a

plural suffix to it. Would anyone really talk about three JP (justices of the

peace), five POW (p

risoners of war), or nine SOB (sons of bitches)?

An additional puzzle surrounds governors-generc~I, solicitors-general, and

attorneys-general. The speakers who bequeathed the plurals to us must have

Dissection by Linguistics

~ 29

analyzed the words as phrases, which have their heads on the left. Indeed, a

governor-general is a general governor, namely, one ~~ho has several governors

under him. The puzzle is, why didn't they simply call him a general governor?

After

all, the adjective comes before the head noun in English, not after it.

The ans~a~er is that these words, together with many other terms related to gov-

ernment, were borrowed from French when England was ruled by the Nor-

mans in the centuries after the invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066. In

French, the adjective can come rafter the head noun, as in Etats-Ufais (United

States) and chaise Iongue (long chair, garbled into the English chaise lounge).

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1292: "Tous at-

tomeyz general purrount lever fins et cinographer" (A

ll general attorneys may

levy fines and make legal documents). Anyone who insists that we eternally

analyze (hence pluralize) these words as they were analyzed in the minds of

the original speakers of Norman French

also should insist that we refer to

more than one major general as majors general, because amajor-general was

once a general major (from the French

nurjor-general). Long ago our linguistic

foreparents forgot the French connection and reanalyzed general from a modi-

fying adjective to a modified noun.

So if you are ever challenged for saying attort2ey-generals, nxother-in-laws,

pc+sserbys, RBIs, or Izole-in-owes, you can reply, "They are the very model of the

modern major general." They come from reanalyzing a phrase into a word, a

common development in the history of English, and a nice demonstration that

we treat stretches of language not as sounds linked directly to meanings but as

structured trees. People who put different trees on the same sound will use

the sound in different ways, even

if the meaning is the same.

Le['s now peer into the morphology box. Morphology maybe divided into de-

rivation—rules that form a new word out of old words, like duckfeathers and

acnlzissable—and inflection—rules that modify a word to

fit its role in a sen-

tence, what language teachers call conjugation and declension. The past tense

and plural forms are examples of in

flection.

English inflection is famous among linguists for being so boring. Other lan-

guages exploit the combinatorial power of grammar to generate impressive

numbers of forms for each noun and verb. The verb in Spanish or Italian

comes in about

fifty forms: fi

rst, second, and third persons, each singular and

plural, each in present, past, and future tenses, each in indicative, subjunctive

and conditional moods, plus some imperative, participle, and infinitive forms.

30

~ Words and Rules

Languages out

side

the Indo-European family, such as th

ose spoken in Af

rica

or the Americas, can be even more prolific. In the Bantu language Kiwnjo, fo

r

example, a ver

b is

encrusted with prefixes and suf

fi~:

es tha

t multiply out

to ha

lf

a mi

llio

n combinations per

ver

b. ~ ~

But Eng

lish

speakers subsist on onl

y four.

open

opens

opened

open

ing

Stra

ngel

y enough, Eng

lish

b ammar does no

t ha

ve onl

y four rol

es for

ver

bs to

play. It has

at least th

irte

en dif

fere

nt roles, but it sh

ares

the four forms among

them, as if

suf

fixe

s were e~c

pens

ive and the designers of the la

ngua

ge wanted

to economize.

The first suf

Fix is

a silent bit of

not

hing

, -~

d, which when added to the stem

opeiz turns

it int

o the inflected fo

rm. open. You may wonder: Why say tha

t

spea

kers

hallucinate an ima

gina

ry suffix at

the

end of a word? The reason

is

that it di

stin

guis

hes th

e root or stem—the irreducible nugget found in th

e

ment

al dictionar

y th

at cap

ture

s th

e essence of

a ver

b and upon which sufFi~ces

aze hung—from a particular incarnation of

tha

t ve

rb with

a_ particular pe

rson

,

number, and tense. In

Eng

lish

they can sound the same—to open and I open—

which disguises the fac

t th

at they are different versions of the verb. In oth

er

lang

uage

s th

e form of th

e ve

rb tha

t you loo

k up in a di

ctio

nary

can

not be pro-

nounced. For example, in Sp

anis

h you can say

canto, cn

nt~i

s, ca~aten, aid so

on, lea

ving

can

t- as the stem, but you can nev

er say

can

t- by itself. Stems are

ther

efor

e no

t the same thi

ngs as pronounceable ver

b forms, and that distinc-

tion is useful to preserve in English—to open ver

sus open0---even though the

two forms sometimes sound the same.

The suffix, -m is

used in

fou

r variations of th

e verb in En

glis

h:

Pres

ent tense, al

l but thi

rd-person singular: I, you, ev

e, the

y opefa

it.

Infi

niti

ve: They may open it,

They tried to op

en it.

Impe

rati

ve: Open!

Subj

unct

ive:

They insisted th

at it open.

The suffix -s is used for

onl

y one pur

pose

:

Pres

ent te

nse,

thi

rd-person singular: He, she

, it

opens the doo

r.

'. DtSS2Cf1011 ~ j,tnpulSliCS 3 ]

~ ~ -

iThe suf

fix -ing is used in at

least four wa

ys:

Pro~essive par

tici

ple.

He is op

enin

g it

.~

Pres

ent pa

rtic

iple

: He tried ope

ning

the

door.

Uerb

al noun (gerund): His incessant openi~zg of

the

box

es:

~ Uerbal adj

ecti

ve: Aq

uiet

ly-o

peni

ng doo

r.'i ~

Finally we come to ou

r friend -ed

, which has

four jobs:

Past

tense: It

ope

ned.

Perf

ect Pa

rtic

iple

: It has

ope

ned.

Pass

ive Pa

rtic

iple

: It was bei

ng ope

ned.

Verbal adj

ecti

ve: Ar

ecen

tly-

ape~

aed boa.''

Why make all the

se distinctions among ver

b forms that sound the same?

One rea

son

is tha

t the

list

of phrases ca

llin

g fo

r a form such as opened have

noth

ing in

common: To cap

ture

the

behavior of

-ed, we hav

e no choice bu

t to

list fou

r phrase typ

es sep

arat

ely.

Another rea

son

is that some dis

tinc

tion

s th

atare in

audi

ble for regular ve

rbs are audible fo

r irregular ones, and thi

s shows

that Eng

lish

spe

aker

s register these distinctions as the

y sp

eak.

About a thi

rd of

the irre u

lar ve

rbs have differ ent fo

g

rms for

the stem th

e asttense and the

Pperfect pa

rtic

iple

: I sing, I san

g, I have su

ng; I eat

, I ate

, I hav

e ea

teia

. A fe~

vI

make a fur

ther

distinction and have a sp

ecia

l form for the

ver

bal adjective--c

:j

saewly wedded co2tiple; c~

clrunlzen sailor; a sl2

runk

esa he

ad; ro

tten

eggs—which is

~, no

t used for

the par

tici

ple:

peo

ple say They hav

e wed, not

wedded; He has

drus

ak, no

t dr

a~nl

en; It

lza

s sh

runk

, no

t shrunlzen; The ems luive rot

ted,

not

rot-

t te

n. And one ver

b comes in ei

ght different forms:

~i In

fini

tive

; su

bjun

ctiv

e; imp

erat

ive:

To be or not

to be

; Let it be; Be

prep

ared

.

Pres

ent te

nse,

first -person singular: I ~m the

walrus.

I Pr

esen

t te

nse,

sec

ond -person sin

gula

r al

l pe

rson

s plural: You/we/they

h ar

e fa

mily

.

Pres

ent te

nse,

thi

rd-person singular: He/she/it is the

rock.

Past tense, first- and thi

rd-person singular: I/he/she/it was bor

n by

the river

~ Past tense, second -person singular, all per

sons

plural; sub

junc

tive

:

h' The way we/

you th

ey wer

e; If I were a rich man.

32 ~

Words and Rules

Progressive and present participle; gerund: Yo

u're being silly; It s not

easy being green; Being and Nothingness.

Perfect participle: I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a

pawn and a king.

With nouns, too, different grammatical forms have to dip into the same

small pool of suffixes. The naked stem dog must be distinguished from the sin-

gular dog + m because a dogcatcher doesn't catch just one dog and a dog Inver

doesn't l

ove just one. The dog inside these compounds refers to dogs in general

and thus differs in meaning from the singular form in a dog. The plural dogs

uses -s, which we have already met in the verb system in She opens the

-door.

The possessive forms dog's (singular) and dogs' (plural) use it too; the three

noun forms dogs, do

g's, and dogs' di

ffer only in punctuation.

All this redundancy suggests that regular inflection in English is remarkably

simple. All the inflections are suFfires; none of the grammatical roles call for a

prefix or some other way of decorating or tinkering with a word. And every

word has at most one inflectional suffix. We never get apensed or opensing, nor

do the plural -s and possessive

's stack up when several owners own something:

the dogs' b

1anl:et, not the dogs's (

dogzez) blanket. Finally, each niblet of sound

making up a suffix has a

life of its own and combines with several verb forms,

noun forms, or both, ra

ther than being a slave to only one role. This suggests

that instead of creditinb English speakers with seventeen verbose rules like

"To form the past tense, add -ed to the end of the verb;' we can credit them

with just one rule:13 "A word may be composed of a stem followed by a suffix,"

like the simple rule shown on page 16. Al

l the other details can be handled by

assuming that suffixes are stored in the mental lexicon with entries like those

for words, perhaps something like this:

-ed so

und: d

part of speech: suffix

use 1: past tense of a verb

use 2: perfect participle of a verb

use 3: passive parriciple of a verb

use 4: adjective formed from a verb

By factoring seventeen verbose rules into one austere rule and four lexical

entries, one per suf£i:c, we not only save ink but get some insight into the men-

Dissection Ins Linguistics 133

tal organization of language. English

~o~~ld have used seventeen different

forms for its seventeen slots in the noun declension and verb oonjUgaeion: Pre-

fi~es such as ib-, tra-, and Tza-, suffixes such as -og, -ig, and -cab, and so on. In-

stead

the

slots share a few sounds (

-~, -ed, -s, -zng) and one position

(immediately following the verb). This miserliness, called syncretism, is

found

in language after language. Syncretism su~;ests that the mind keeps separate

accounts for the templates that build words (for example, "word =stem + suf-

fi~'), fo

r the scraps of sound that maybe added to words (-

s, -ed, and -ing), and

for the roles these additions can play (for example, plural, participle, impera-

tive).~~ A particular construction like the English past tense is a. min -and-

match affair, assembled by hool:ina together parts

also used in other

constructions. No one knows why languages like to recycle their suffixes and

other ways of modifying words. It's certainly not to save memory space, be-

cause the savings are

trivial. Perhaps the reason

is to help listeners recognize

when a ~rord is composed of a stem and a suffix rather than being a simple

stem. Whatever its purpose, syncretism shows that in the language system,

combination is in the blood; even the tiniest suffixes are combinations of

smaller parts.

Syncretism—one form, several roles—is one I:ind of violation of the simplest

conceivable system in which every sound has one meaning and vice -versa. The

other hind of violation—one role, several forms—is rampant in languages as

well; linguists call it allomorphy.~~ Take the regular past -tense suffix---or is it

suffixes? Though always spelled -ed, it

is pronounced in three different ways.

In walked, it

is pronounced t. In jogged, it

is pronounced c~

. And in patted, it is

pronounced id, where i is

a neutral vowel called "schwa." We also find allomor-

phy in the regular plural: The suffvc -s has three different forms in cats, dogs,

and Izorses.

Are there in fact three past -tense suffixes and three plural suffixes? In some

languages, we are forced to this messy conclusion. Dutch speakers, for exam-

ple, select either -en or -s as the regular plural, depending; on the sound of the

end of the noun. But in English the three-~~vay variation has a simpler explana-

tion, worked out by the linguists Arnold Zwicky and Alan Prince.,_0~2e past

tense suffix is stored in the lexicon, not three, and a separate module fiddles

with its pronunciation: the rules of phonolog}; which define the sound pattern

or accent of a language.16

3-}

~ Wo

rds and Ru

les

Why do we pronounce the past tense suffix as t in

tiv

nike

d, d in joked, and~d

in pat

ted?

The choice is

com

plet

ely predictable, and can be stated as

a list of

rule

s:

1. Use ~d if

the verb ends in t or d (fo

r example, in pa

tted

and

pc~c~ied).

2.If it do

esn'

t, use t if the ve

rb ends in an unvoiced consonant—

that is,

a consonant in which the voc

al cords don't buzz, namely

p, k, f,

s, sh

, c1i, and th (for example, tap

ped,

wal

l ed, gassed,

snif

fed,

passed, bas

hed,

touched, and fr

othe

d).

3. Use d for all oth

er verbs: th

ose ending in vowels, such as played

and glowed, and those ending in the voi

ced consonants 1,

r, na, n,

b, g, v,

z, j,

zh, and th (for example, sme

lled

, 7~aarred, slan~naed,

plan

ned,

scrubbed, peed, sa

ved, bu.

<ed, ti

crged, cam

oufl

aged

, and

bath

ed).

This

sounds lik

e something out

of the ta

e co

de. Let's se

e if we can do bet

ter.

The first thing to no

tice

is th

at nothing in these rules is

specific to the pas

t

tense. Other constructions tha

t use -ed work the same way.

t d

-~

Past

tense:

kick

ed

flowed

patt

ed

Perf

ect participle:

has kicked

has flogged

has pa

tted

Pass

ive pa

rtic

iple

_ v~~as lucked

was flogged

was patted

Verb

al adjective:

a licked dog

a flogged horse

a pa

tted

cat

Outs

ide the ve

rb system entirely is ye

t another -ed construction tha

t comes in

the three variations; it

turns a noun tha

t means ':X" into an adj

ecti

ve tha

t

means "having Y":

c

Nominal adj

ecti

ve:

hooked

saber-toothed

pimple-f

aced

foulmouthed

thick-ne

cked

d

~d

lonb nose

d one-handed

horned

talented

winged

kind

hear

ted

moneyed

warm-blooded

bad-

temp

ered

bareheaded

Diss

ecti

on by

Livcgacistics

~ 35

The regular plu

ral -s als

o comes in three fo

rms,

~n~

hich

you can hear in

hC~1

.t~J

LS~ C~OaS, and Hor

ses.

The variation mir

rors

t}ie pact tense uncannily. Use -i=

when the noun ends in a sibilant sou

nd: s, ~, sh, ~h

, j, or ch. If it

doe

sn't

, use s

if the

noun ends in an unv

oice

d co

nson

ant.

Use z for

all

oth

er nouns. In fa

ct,

not on

ly does thi

s pattern appear with the plural, it

appears with th

e other -s

suff

ixes

as well:

'

~zPlural:

hawks

dogs

hors

es3rd pe

rson

sin

gula

r:

hits

sh

eds

chooses

Poss

essi

ve:

Pat's

Fred's

George's

The var

iati

on even appears in versions of -s

that ar

en't

genuine suf

fixe

s. En-

glis

h speakers commonly con

trac

t th

e ve

rbs has, is

, and does to the

ir final con-

sona

nt and glu

e it

ont

o the end of the su

bjec

t, as in

Mona's left or Da

d's home.

Sure

enough, the con

trac

tion

is pronounced in th

ree wa

ys, depending on how

the noun end

s:

s>-i

?12

as:

Pat's eaten.

Fred

's eat

en.

George's eat

en.

u~

Pat's ea

ting

. Fr

ed's

eat

ing.

Ge

orge

's eat

ing.

does:

What

's he want?

Where's he liv

e?

That

's riot all. Eng

lish

has

an affective -s th

at can be used to form nicknames in

some dialects and arg

ots,

as in

Pops, Nloms, Fats, Pats, and Wil

ls (th

e prince

seco

nd in line to th

e British throne). That -s can also show up in emotionally

colo

red sl

ang such as bo

~a~e

rs and nut

s, similar to the -y and -o th

at give us

Batt

}~ and wacko. (Sometimes the

two suffixes are even used tog

ethe

r, as in

Patr

y, Sac

gsy,

lVlxcgsy, foo

tsie

, fat

so, and Ratso.) St

ill another ve

rsio

n of -s

appears

in adv

erbi

al forms such as xa

nawa

res,

nowadays, bes

ides

, baclavards, thereaboicts,

and nmi

ds)z

ips.

A fin

al use for s is as

a meaningless link joining the ~n~ords in

compounds such as he

r-nt

snxa

n, st

ates

nxa~

a, kiv

esma

n, bon

dsnu

rn, Scotsman, and

gra~atsnucnship. And yes

, al

l of these -s'

s can be pronounced eit

her as s or as z,

depe

ndin

g on the pre

cedi

ng con

sona

nt (i

t's ha

rd to come up with examples for

the th

ird column):

s Z

~,Af

fect

ive:

Po

ps, Patsy

Wills, bon

kers

36 ~

Words aful Rul

es

Adverbial:

thereabouts

towards, now

aday

s

Link in compound:

hunt

sman

la

ndsm

an

So we have fifteen su

ffic

es tha

t show the same three-way or two-~vay varia-

tion

. Forty-one suffices tha

t ha

ppen

to fa

ll into fi

ftee

n parallel sets of

alterna-

tive

s is too

much of a coincidence to

sto

mach

. More lik

ely,

one

set

of ru

les

creates th

e three-way va

riat

ion,

and

the

set applies in at

leas

t fi

ftee

n situations.

There

is a second, equally striking set of coincidences th

at runs across the

suff

ixes

. If the

var

iati

on came From any old set of if ... then ru

les,

eve wo

uld

e~cpect to fin

d al

l ki

nds of

pai

ring

s between st

ems an

d su

f$ae

s: for example,

"Use s after the

vow

els a an

d e or

after the consonants th and g," "Use d after a

lz,"

and so on. But the rul

es are far mor

e la

wful

tha

n th

at. The t sou

nd comes

after un

voic

ed consonants, and the t its

elf i

s un

voic

ed. The ~i

sou

nd comes af-

ter voiced sou

nds,

and the

d itself is voiced. The -s suffixes show the

same

cham

eleo

nlik

e be

havi

or: We find un

voic

ed s aft

er unv

oice

d consonants, and

voic

ed z after voi

ced co

nson

ants

. It

looks as if som

ethi

ng is trying to ke

ep the

cons

onan

ts at the end of a word consistent: All

of them are

voi

ced,

or

all of

them are unv

oice

d.

Inde

ed, something is—the sou

nd pat

tern

of th

e En

glis

h la

ngua

ge. English

neve

r forces speakers to turn their vo

cal co

rds on for one

consonant the

n off

for the ne

xt, or ~~ice-versa. We see

the restriction in force in

one-piece words

that

end in a cluster of consonants. These words never rec

eive

d a suffix; they

just

hap

pen to be bu

ilt that way

, so any sou

nd pat

tern

they display ca

nnot

have

come from a su

ffix

rul

e, but

rat

her fr

om the way Eng

lish

speakers li

ke to pro-

nounce wor

ds in ge

nera

l. In

all but on

e of

these wor

ds, the vo

cal co

rd swi

tch

can be

left in

the ̀bff' po

siti

on:

Afte

r Iz (u

nvoi

ced)

: scan occ

ur

z can

not occur

Gll'

, fT,

X~ ~70.Y,

-

t ca

n oc

cur

cI can

not oc

cur

act,

fi~ct, pro

duct

—

Afte

r p (un

voic

ed):

scan occ

ur

z can

not occur

traipse, lapse, co

rpse

—

t can occur

c~ can

not oc

cur

apt, opt, abriLpt

—

Afte

r t (un

voic

ed):

scan occ

ur

z can

not oc

cur

blit

z, Iz

ibit

z, Pot

ts

—

Afte

r s (u

nvoi

ced)

: t can occur

d can

not oc

cur

post

, gho

st,

list

—

Diss

ecti

on ]~

y Lin

guis

tics

~ 37

In one

Eng

lish

wor

d, ad

>e, the vocal co

rd switch is left in the "on"position:

Afte

r d (v

oice

d):

s ca

nnot

occ

ur

z can occ

ur—

adze

In no English wo

rd is the vo

icin

g switch toiled on and off, in an en

ding

lik

ezt

, gs, 1:

z, or sd

.These

diff

icul

t -to-p

rono

unce clu

ster

s can, how

ever

, be cre

ated

by a dumb

rule

of morphology tha

t pi

ns a suf

fix onto the end of a ~r

ord without regard for

how the resulting train of consonants is to

be pr

onou

nced

. Th

at- is wha

t ha

p-pe

ns when a rule adds a d sou

nd to tivalk or an

s sou

nd to cl

og. En

glis

h cleans

up the

se awkward mismatches with a different kind of

rule. The rule says,

"When the

re is a cluster of

consonants at

the end of a syllable, ad

just

the voi

c-in

g se

ttin

g of the Iast co

nson

ant to make it

con

sist

ent with its

neighbor on the

left

." (I

n ot

her words, cha

nge hz

to lu

, pd

to pt

, an

d so on.

) The rule does not

care

whe

ther

the syllable was for

med by

a past -tense

suffi~c, a plural su

ffix

, a

contracted has

, a ni

ckna

me wit

h -s, o

r an

ythi

ng else. It ki

cks in aft

er the

sylla-

ble ha

s be

en ass

embl

ed, in the cle

anup

module we cal

l phonology.

Can we now tel

l wh

ethe

r the su

ffix

sto

red in

the

lex

icon

is -d

, an

d is con

-verted to a t when it finds it

self

at the end of wc~lh, or wh

ethe

r it is -t

and

is

conv

erte

d to

c~ when it f

inds its

elf a

t the end of

jog? A little detective work can

sett

le the que

stio

n. Not every sou

nd cares about the con

sona

nt tha

t follows

it.

Thos

e th

at do are consonants in wh

ich th

e ai

rstr

eam is obstructed, nam

ely ~,

b, t,

d, '

k, g, s

, sh, ch,

z, zh

, an

d tla. But the

vowels, and

the vow

el-l

ike co

nso-

nant

s r, 1,

sa, and na, are

indifferent to wh

at comes after the

m; they to

lera

te ei-

ther

s or z,

eith

er t or

d, as we see in these on

e-pi

ece wo

rds:

After

M1a:

scan occ

ur

z can also oc

cur

fence

leas

t can occur

d can also oc

cur

lent

lend

After

r:

scan occur

z can also oc

cur

force

fii re

t can oc

cur

d can also oc

cur

}ort

ford

After

1:

scan occur

z can also oc

cur

puls

e Stolz

t can occur

cl can also oc

cur

guil

t gacild

3S ~

Words and Rules

After a vowel:

scan occur

z can also occur

niece

snee<e

t can occur

d can also occur

goat

goad

Here we have laissez-faire environments in which the suffices can show

their true colors, untouched by rules of phonology. What do we find? That the

virgin suffices are pronounced -d and -z, not -t and -s:

After n:

After r:

After

I:

After a vo~~el:

we don't say s

w~e don't say t

we don't say s

~n~e don't say t

~.ve don't say s

we don't say t

we don't say s

eve don't say t

we say<

grins (grim), piers (Pinz)

we say c~

grinned

we say<

tivears (wen), co

res (kon)

we say c~

feared

eve say z

calls (

kolz), balls (bolt)

«~e say d

snaffled, w

ell-heeled

we say z

flees (flez), flecu (flez)

we say d

flrnved

The -t and -s ~~>e hear in words with choosy sounds such as walked and cats

must be the aftermath of the rule.

Finally, ~n~hat about the funny extra vowel in patted and korses? Here again

the change in sound is not some random act of vandalism. The vowel appears

when d follows t or d, and when z follows s or z. The ~~ord endings that trigger

the extra vowel are similar in pronunciation to the sufFixes themselves, and that

can't be a coincidence. Apparently a rule is trying to separate too-similar adja-

cent consonants by pushing a vowel between them: between t and d, d and d, s

and z, z and z, sh and >, and so on. In many languabes the rules of phonology do

something when a rule of morphology leaves two identical or near-identical

consonants in a row, presumably because there's no natural way to pronounce

them. Some languages drop the second consonant, others merge the two into

Dissection by Linguistics

~ 39

one long consonant, and s

till others, like English, wedge a vowel between

them. As with the rule that fiddles with voicing, the rule that inserts a vowel

must live in a phonology module separate from rules that stick on the various

suffixes, because the rule is oblivious to what hind of suffix it manipulates.

We even can deduce which of the two rules applies first, the one that

changes the voicing setring or the one that inserts the vowel_ The devoicing

rule is triggered by adjacent consonants; the vowel rule breaks up adjacent

consonants. If the voicing rule came first, it would convert pct + d to pat + t,

and only then would the vowel be inserted, yielding pant:

Morphology:

pat + d

Devoicing:

pat + t

Vo~~>el insertion:

pat + ~r + t

But that is not how we pronounce it; we say pdtid. This means that the vowel

rule must have come first, creating patted; now the voicinb rule. is

no longer

compelled to do anything, because the td sequence that would trigger it has

been broken up:

Morphology:

pat + d

Vowel insertion: pat + ~+ d

Devoicing:

not triggered

The ordering makes sense when you think about ho~~ the phonology module

should be organized. It has some rules that edit the string of vowels and conso-

nants composing a word (phonology proper), and other rules that comrert the

string into

actual sounds or muscle movements (phonetics). The vowel

-insertion rule makes a major change in the stuff that makes up a word, and be-

longs in the first subcomponent; the voicing rule does alast-minute adjustment

of pronunciation for the benefit of the muscles, and belongs in the second. ~

%This completes the analysis of the three versions of the past-tense

suffice.

When we started, eve needed forty-odd rules, each stipulating that some suffix

be placed next to some word ending. We have ended up with just two rules.

Best o£ all, what the rules do, why they do it, and in what order they do it all

40 ~

Wo

rds

arecl R

ifle

s

make sen

se in the li

ght of the sou

nd pattern of En

glis

h. Ind

eed,

this

kin

d of

layering may be found in languages

all ov

er the wor

ld.

Incidentally, t

here

is cor

robo

rati

ng evidence of a completely different ki

nd that

show

s that the thr

ee for

ms of -ed and

-s are

created on th

e fly by

a pho

nolo

gica

l

rule. Some psy

chol

ingu

ists

keep a pad and pen

cil in their pockets and

wri

te

down every sli

p of the

ton

gue they hear. Peo

ple make one

or t~vo such errors for

ever

y th

ousa

nd words the

y say, and many of the errors con

sist

in deleting, r

epeat-

ing,

or switching around vowels or consonants.is'Fhe last I

dnd of

err

or is called a

Spoo

neri

sm, in

honor of the Reverend Wil

liam

Spooner (1844-1930},warden of

New Col

lege

at Oxford, who came out w2th surprises such as O~ir que

er old

clean,

You hav

e hi

ssed

all

my r~z

yste

ry les

sons

and tas

ted th

e wh

ole wornz, and It is

naw

kistomary to

cus

s th

e br

ide.

They sound too goo

d to be tru

e, but I hav

e he

ard si

m-

ilar errors myself. Af

ter I sp

oke at

a scientific symposium th

e ch

air wr

appe

d up

the session by

saying I

would like to spank the

speakers, and

when I ask

ed a fri

end

how he li

ked hi

s new condominium, he said It se

ats my ni

icle

s.

Speech err

ors provide clues on

-how the speech sy

stem

is or

gani

zed.

For

ex-

ample, when a per

son intends to

say grapefruits but accidentally le

aves

out the

t, how does he pro

noun

ce the plural? If th

ere we

re a dis

tinc

t plural suf

fix pro-

nounced

-ss, he would say gra

pefr

ooss

, since th

is is wh

at the t in the gr

apef

rtii

it

entr

y would have demanded. In fact he says grapefrooz—pronouncing the

plur

al as z, which is appropriate to words end

ing in a vow

el.1

9 Si

mila

rly,

a per-

son may say The infant ti~.clzs—toaiches th

e ni

pple

, no

t tucl -zs, or may say Did

you bu

}' ~o~igh breakfasis?, no

t ~reczkfass. The errors show tha

t the form of the

suff

ix must be computed aft

er the vowels and consonants of

the

noun or ve

rb

were placed on the chute to th

e vo

cal tr

act.

Engl

ish di

d no

t al

ways

hav

e si

ngle-consonant suf

fixe

s and a rule that separates

them from ato

o-si

mila

r word ending. Our cur

rent

sys

tem

is the

res

ult of

a reor-

ganization tha

t began around the

time of the

ori

gin of

Modern Eng

lish

in th

e se

v-

enteenth century. Be

fore

that, -ed and -s su

ffic

es were pro

noun

ced (and spe

lled

)

with vowels

all the ti

me, no

t just with words ending in t or d or in

s or z. For cen

-

turies, En

glis

h speakers had been concentrating str

ess on the

fir

st syllables of

word

s, whi

ch shriveled the later syllables, an

d sp

eake

rs beg

an to le

ave ou

t the

vowe

ls in th

e su

ffix

es of many words. Wr

iter

s ca

lled

att

enti

on to the new, cl

ippe

d

pronunciations by sp

elli

ng them phonerically with an apostrophe in pl

ace of

the

dele

ted vowel, as in Sha

kesp

eare

's pla

y about "a

pair of st

ar-c

ross

'd lov

ers"

:

Deat

h, th

at has

suc

k'd the honey of thy

bre

ath,

Hath no power yet

upon thy

beauty:

Diss

ecti

on Icy

Linguistics

41

Thou art

not

conquer'd; be

auty

's ensign ye

tIs

crimson in th

y lips and in thy ch

eeks

.

The gua

rdia

ns of the En

glis

h la

ngua

ge deplored the change, as they do all

chan

ces.

In "A Pro

posa

l fo

r Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaininc th

e En-

glish Tongue," Jon

atha

n Sw

ift wrote:

What does yo

ur lor

dshi

p think of [he words "dr

udg'

d," "d

istu

rb'd

," "'

rebuk'd,"

"fledg'd," and a thousand others eve

rywh

ere to

be met ~a

~ith in prose as well as

I ve

rse?

Where, by leaving out a vowel ro

save a syllable, we form so

jarring a so

und,

and so difficult to ut

ter,

that I ha

ve oft

en won

dere

d how it

cou

ld eve

r obtain.

His con

temp

orar

y, Samuel Johnson, who was sta

ndar

dizi

ng the spellings of

Engl

ish words in a way tha

t re

flec

ted the morphemes tha

t composed them,

recognized that 'd and -ed were the same morpheme, and obliterated the dis-

tinction in th

eir spelling, making ed the spe

llin

g fo

r bo

th.'

-~ It is

unc

lear

why

he chose to le

ave th

e e in -ed across the board (mapped and mat

ted)

, bu

t op

ted

to spe

ll -s ei

ther

with or wit

hout

an e, depending on how it is

pronounced

(nui

ps and rruuses).

Today the old

syl

labi

c su

ffix

survives in a han

dful

of ad

ject

ives

:.ac

curs

ed,

aged

, beloti~ed, beaded (i

n th

e ex

pres

sion

ova

beaded knees), blessed, cro

olze

d,cu

ssed

, do

gged

, jc~

ooed

, le

arne

d, nalzed, rc~~~ed, wicl ed, and tivretched. (A few

more survive in rural dialects, such as f

orke

d, pea

ked,

streaked, and str

iped

.)''

Many of them are arc

haic

or po

etic

and are used mainly in sel

f-co

nsci

ous

speech. The psy

chol

ogis

t 1V

Ieli

ssa Bowerman, a researcher of

chi

ld lan

guag

e,had thi

s exchange with he

r four-year -ol

d da

ught

er about a class tri

p to

a nat-

ural his

tory

mus

eum:

'-'

n40T

HER

(play~ully): N(a

ybe you'll see

som

ethi

ng winged.

DAUGHTER: Maybe well see something snaked!

We've seen ~vhy the syntax box

, which builds ph

rase

s and sen

tenc

es, ha

s to be

separated from the morphology bo

x, whi

ch bui

lds words. We als

o have seen

why the

phonology box, which massages wor

ds into a pronounceable st

ream

of

42 ~

Wo

rds and

Rcales

sound, has

to be sep

arat

ed from syn

tax,

mor

phol

ogy,

and the

lex

icon

. But why

do eve

need separate boxes fo

r semantics (the tho

ught

s ex

pres

sed in

lan

guag

e)

and the

lexicon? Could we reduce the

dif

fere

nce between reg

ular

and irre~,ular

verb

s to a dif

fere

nce in meaning between the two kin

ds of ve

rbs,

rat

her than

putting one kind in the morphology box and the oth

er in the le

xico

n? Do we

even need to talk about an "en

try in

the

mental le

xico

n," th

e address in

mem-

ory that hol

ds a link to a sound and a link to a meaning? Or cou

ld we connect

thou

ghts

to sounds dir

ectl

y, eli

mina

ting

the

middleman? Here are some fac

ts

that

suggest tha

t we do need to credit the human mind with something like

dict

iona

ry entries.

Firs

t, the Eng

lish

irregular verbs could not

have ari

sen simply from a com-

munal effort to opt

imiz

e cl

arit

y. While irregular forms on ave

rage

are harder to

mistake fo

r th

eir base forms than regular forms are

(br

ing do

esn'

t sound lik

e

brought, nor take li

ke took.), many irregulars ar

e id

enti

cal to

the

ir base fo

rms:

Toda

y I hit

, ye

ster

day I hi

t; Tod

cry I

ptia

t, yesterday I pt

iit.

A sentence such as On

Wednesday I cut

the

gra

ss could mean las

t V~~ednesday, nex

t Wednesday, or

every Wednesday. If

citit were reg

ular

, the ambiguity would never ari

se: On

Wednesday I Gut

ted th

e grass would sin

gle ou

t the pr

eced

ing Wednesday. De-

spite the po

tent

ial am

bigu

ity,

how

ever

, twenty-eight Eng

lish

ver

bs insist on re-

mairiing unchanged in the pa

st tense.

Also

, ir

regu

lar forms do not

cor

rela

te with any kind of

meaning. Nlany ver

bs

are si

mila

r in meaning but have com

plet

ely di

ffer

ent pa

st-tense for

ms. For es

-

ample, hi

t, st

rilze, and skip

all refer to hitting. Hi

t is

an irr

egul

ar ~~e

rb tha

t do

es

not change in the pa

st tense: Today

tive

hit

golf balls; Yes

terd

ay use hit

golf bulls.

Strike is an irr

egul

ar verb that changes its vow

el, yi

eldi

ng stricck. And sla

p is

a

regu

lar ve

rb, with pas

t tense sl

appe

d.

Not only are th

ere verbs with sim

ilar

meanings and different past-tense

form

s, the

re are

ver

bs with different meanings and the same past-tense fo

rms.

Engl

ish has a class of ve

rbs li

ngui

sts ca

ll lig

ht ver

bs, such as come, ~o,

do,

talz

e,

have

, se

t, get, pt

ict,

and stnvul. Compared to or

dinary ver

bs they are le

ss filling; a

ligh

t ve

rb doe

sn't

have a meaning tha

t stays with it,

but takes on dozens of

meanings, especially in combination with pa

rtic

les such as in

, out, up, off

,

over

, and around:

come (move to he

re),

coi

~ze around (agree), come in to (inherit),

cone (re

ach or

gasm

), come off

cu (a

ppea

r), come ozi

t (d

ivul

ge ho-

mose:tuality), comae to (a~,vaken)

Diss

ecti

on 1~~

Linguistzcs

~ 43

go (move to th

ere)

, go out

with (date), go nut

s (dement), go i~a

for

(cho

ose)

, go of

f (emslode), g

o of

f (sp

oil)

do (act), do in (hill), do up (decorate), do a number on (ov

erwh

elm)

,do lainch (e

at together)

take (ca

use to go v«th), ta

lxe in (swindle), ta

ke off (launch), ta

pe in

(welcome), tak

e ov

er (us

urp)

, ta

ke icp (commence), tak

e a lea

k(u

rina

te),

tak

e a bath (lose money), tak

e c~

bath (b

athe

), tak

e cz

walk (wa

lk),

talz

e a loo

k (l

ook)

hai~e (possess), have (eat), luzve (se

duce

), hav

e a he

art (s

ympa

thiz

e),

have

over (entertain), hnve a coi

n (be ang

ry)

het (r

etri

eve)

, get

(become), ge

t over (su

rviv

e), ge

t ou

t (d

ivul

ge),

get

off on (en

joy)

, het a life (

self-i

mpro

ve)

set (p

lace

), se

t of

f (ig

nite

), se

t ac

p (arrange), se

t trip (tr

ick)

, se

t up (in

-troduce), se

t right (r

ectify

), se

t th

e st

age (p

repa

re)

put (cause to be'at), pzit off

(pro

cras

tina

te),

past

off

(off

end)

, ~ar.t one

over on (fool), pact do

nna (insult), put dawn (euthanize), put

i~x for

(req

uest

), put

oac

t extinguish), pact out (inconvenience), put

out

(con

sent

to sex)

stai

ad (rise), sta

nd out (impress), st

and up fo

r (defend), st

and in (re

-place), s

tand

off

(rep

el)

But in every in

stan

ce the

y retain their irregular past te

nse forms in the eY-

tend

ed meanings: Barney came aro

und,

Barney came out, Barney cnn

ae off as

(nev

er conzeci); Joan toolz hinz in, j

oczn took a bat

h, Joan to

ol over (never raked);

and so on

. Al

l the meanings march in lo

ckst

ep with the same irr

egul

ar past-

tens

e fo

rms,

no matter how tenuous the semantic th

read

tha

t li

nks them. The

mind links an irr

egul

ar sound such as took not

with the meaning of a word di-

rect

lybu

t with the word's root—a unique address in the mental lexicon, li

keth

e bo

ldfa

ced entry fo

r a word in a dictionary which can hav

e se

vera

l mean-

ings listed under it.'-3

An even more curious demonstration comes from families of

words with th

esame stem and dif

fere

nt pre

fixe

s. Words with prefixes keep the

past -tense

form of the stem: eat—ate becomes ove

reat

—ove

rate

; make—made becomes re-

nza~

Ze—r

emad

e. That is not surprising, because we a

ll hear th

e eat inside

overeat—overeating is,

aft

er all

, a kind of eating, na

mely

, eating too much.

What is surprising is that the same

- thing happens when the meaning of the

combination

is opaque. Few peo

ple se

nse the meaning of the stand inside

44 ~

Words and Rules

understand, the get inside fo

rget, or the come inside become. Nonetheless no

one is tempted to sa

y un

cier

stav

zded

, for

gett

ed, or becomed; the irregular forms

persist, giving us understood, forgot, and became. Here are some examples:

come~ance, become—became, overcome—overcame

go—went, undergo—undenuent

get bot, forget forgot

tnke—toolz, mi

stal

ze—m

isto

ok, overtczlze—overtook, partal:e~artook,

undertc~ ke

—%incle r

too k

set set, beset—beset, i

spset—ic~set

stand—stood, understand—understood, tivithstand ~,vithstood

draw-

-dre

w, withdrenv—withdrew

hold—held, hehoid—beheld, uphold—upheld, withholdwithheld

blue gave, forgii~e forgnve

Irregular forms stick like glue to their verb roots, even when reduced to

mean

ingl

ess

little tokens inside a biker verb. Speakers of English seem to an-

alyze become as be

- +come and understand as isn

cler

- + stazul, even though the

meaning of become is not computable from the meaning of be

- and the mean-

ing of come, and icn

ders

tasa

cl has nothing to do with st

andi

ng. Th

is is not some-

thing we have to Iearn in school. When we acquire language, our minds

analyze sets of wo

rds,

looking for their parts as if they were clues in a combi-

natorial puzzle. We mentally arrange them in a matri~t according to overlap:

be-

over-

under-

up-

with

cone

beco

v~2e

overcome

draw

withdrew

]col

d be

hold

tiipho2d

withhold

set

beset

upset

sta~ad

T-arulerstand

with

stan

d

talze

overtake

undertalze

and use the

common denominators in

the

rows and columns to make incisions

in the wor

ds, thinking of them the

reaf

ter as amalgams of parts: becrnrae =fie- +

covne>

withdraw = ur

ith- +draw, and so

on.'

-~

Of course, it

was English speakers of

cen

turies pas

t, our

linguistic ances-

tors, who first analyzed become as be- + con

2e and ext

ende

d the come—came

pattern to it, and i[ is

possible that to them the words were as transparently

Dissection IT

}~ Li

7zgu

isti

cs ~

45

built ou

t of parts as overeat or remake are to us today. Even so;

. it is

unlikely

t}]3[ VJfE ~13

Ve been StUplCl~y 111C'171oIiZing ~ie

ccz~

~ze,

ovesca„~e, w-<rl<drew, and so on

as structureless strings of vowels and consonants. If we were to come across a

new complex word, such as i~ndercov~ae, bestand, overbold, or withset, and were

unaware of it

s meaning, we would almost certainly use the irregular forms of

j th

e words inside them: ii

ndercanae (not undercomed), he

stoocl ove

rhel

d ,v

itlu

et.

~i Mo

reov

er, it is not pure sound that carries th

e irregular form: The past of su

.c-

cunab and encumber are

succicmbed and encumbered, not succnnae and encanze-

ber, because people don't perceive them as containing a prefix followed by the

word crn~ie, only th

e sound kung.

~i Clearly the perception of an embedded word comes from its spelling: be-

conxe contains c-o-nz-e; succicn2b doesn't. But spelling does not directly inform

speakers how to form the past tense; it merely assigns a distinct visual sig

na-

ture to ev

ery root, and speakers choose the past -tense form that goes with the

root. Samuel Johnson, who standardized the spellings of

thousands of modern

words, used pe

ople

's perception of

the anatomy of words as a rationale in

his

decisions, and that is

one of the reasons that the spellings of English words no-

tori

ousl

y do not always reflect th

eir sounds; often they reflect morphological

stru

ctur

e instead. We see thi

s in the many words that sound alike but are not

perceived as bei

ng the same word (that is, as having the

same root), and are

not given th

e same past -tense form:

nseet—tazet

versus

mete—nzetec~

nnp rang

versus

wring—wl

- asng

.bear—bore

versus

bare

—bar

edsteal—stole

versus

steel—steeled

frea

k—br

olze

versus

brake—bralzed

In the

last three ca

ses the spellings divulge the presence of words that are

rec-

ognizable in other guises—the adjective bare, the noun steel, th

e noun brake—

and we will see in chapter 6 that this makes an especially big difference in

how ~~e compute their past tense forms.'-'

The English system of inflection, we have seen, dissects cleanly into a few

simple components. Tie past -tense rule belongs to a component, morphology,

that bui

lds throbs out

of parts using rules. The rule itself is a masterpiece of

46

~ 4~

~ord

s arui Rul

es

minimalism—"a word can be composed of a stem and asuffix"—with all

oth

er

details distilled ou

t and col

lect

ed in the lexical en

try fo

r the suffix. The suf

fix

itself is shared among sev

eral

inf

lect

ions

(pa

st tense, participle, and so on),

and its var

iant

pro

nunc

iati

ons (t, d, -i

ci) do not

wastefully mu

ltip

ly listings but

are computed aut

omat

ical

ly by two ubiquitous rules of phonology. The distinc-

tion

ber

ivee

n the le

~tic

on (in

clud

ing ir

regu

lar inflection) and grammar (indud-

ing

regular in

flec

tion

) is

a d

isti

ncti

on between a

lis

t of entries and an

algo

rith

m fo

r combining them, rather th

an a side ef

fect

of a general ye

arni

ng

to distinguish mea

ning

s.

That lea

ves the irregular wo

rds.

Every irr

egul

ar tel

ls a sto

ry, and the

y ar

e the

topic of

the nex

t chapter.

3

~~~~1~` ~~~~~~~1`~~

n the

game known as Broken Telephone (or Chinese Whispers) a child

whis

pers

a phrase in

to the ear

o£ a second child, who whispers

it into the

ear of

a thi

rd child, and so on

. Distortions ac

cumu

late

, and when the

las

t child

announces the phr

ase,

it is co

mica

lly different from the original_ The game

~~orlcs because each child does no

t me

rely

degrade the phr

ase,

which would

culm

inat

e in

a mumble, but

recinalyzes it

, making a best guess about th

e words

the preceding ch

ild had in mind.

AlI la

ngua

ges change through the centuries. We do not

speak lik

e Shake-

spea

re (1564-1616), who did

not

speak lik

e Chaucer (1343-1400), who did

not speak like the au

thor

of Beowulf (around 750—s00). As the changes tak

epl

ace,

people fe

el the ground ero

ding

under the

ir feet and in every era have

pred

icte

d the imminent demise of the la

ngua

ge. Ye

t the tw

elve

hundred years

of changes since Beawaslf ha

ve not

lef

t us grunting like Tarzan, and tha

t is

be-

caus

e language change is a game of Broken Telephone.

A gen

erat

ion of speakers uses their lex

icon

and grammar to produce sen-

tences. The you

nger

generation li

sten

s to the sentences and tri

es to in

fer the

lexi

con and grammar, the remarkable feat we call Ia

ngua

ge acq

uisi

tion

. The

tran

smis

sion

of a lex

icon

and grammar in language acq

uisi

tion

is fairly hig

h in

fidelity—you pro

babl

y can communicate well

~n~i

th you

r pa

rent

s and you

r chil-

*For

a cha

rt th

at summarizes the history, da

tes,

and fam

ily affinities of t

he Eng

lish

language, se

epa

ge 212

.

47

~.z

;—

-~ ~~,"

~'~„~a

c.~.~

,~~ ,

,~.-

f-~, ~' .~ r,

~~

1 r~

r'L°°

~ ! ~. ~'I

J

n,,.,

L ~,

~~''' ~-

,9

;, s

r

''

`~

~~t~

~~

~~

~C,ID~]E~1E~~

anguage comes so naturally to us that it is easy to forbet what a strange

and miraculous b ft it i

s. All over the world members of our species fash-

ion their breath into hisses and hums and squeaks and pops and listen to oth-

ers do the same. We do this, of course, not only because we like the sounds

but because details of the sounds contain information about [he intentions of

the person making them. We humans are fitted with a means of sharing our

ideas, in

all their unfathomable vastness. When we listen to speech, we can be

led to think thoughts that have never been thought before and that never

would have occurred to us on our own. Behold, the bush burned with fire, and

the bush was not consumed. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, cl

ever, and rich, with a comfortable home and

happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best hlessin~s of existence.

Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. I have found it impossi-

ble to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as

King without the help and support of the woman I love.

Language has fascinated people for thousands of years, and linguists have

studied every detail, from the number of languages spoken in New Guinea to

why we say rc~zzle-daz`le instead of cI

a>zle-razzle. Yet to me the first and deepest

challenge in understanding language is accounting for its boundless expressive

power. WE~at is the trick behind our ability to

fill one another's heads with so

many different ideas?

2 ~

Words and Ru

les

The pre

mise

of th

is boo

k is that th

ere are two tricks, wor

ds and

rul

es. They

work by different pr

inci

ples

, are

Tea

med an

d us

ed in different ways, a

nd may eve

n

resi

de in different pa

rts of

the

brain. T

heir

bor

der di

sput

es sha

pe and

reshape lan-

guages over centuries, and

make lan

guag

e no

t on

ly a too

l fo

r communication bu

t

also a medium for wordplay an

d po

etry

and

an he

irlo

om of endless fascination.

The fi

rst trick, the wor

d, is

bas

ed on a memorized

arbitrary pa

irin

g between a

soun

d and a me

anin

g. "Wh

at's

in a name?" ask

s Juliet. "That whi

ch eve cal

l a

rose by any ot

her name wou

ld smell as sw

eet.

" What's in a name is th

at eve

ry-

one in

a lan

guag

e community tac

itly

ao~rees to us

e a pa

rric

ular

sou

nd to convey

a pa

rtic

ular

ide

a. Alt

houg

h th

e wo

rd rose does not

sme

ll sweet or have tho

rns,

we can

use it

to co

nvey

the idea of a rose because

all of

us have lea

rned

, at our

moth

er's

kne

e or

in th

e pl

aygr

ound

, th

e same lin

k between a noise and a

thou

ght.

Now any of us

can con

vey th

e thought by

mal

ting

the noi

se.

The the

ory that wor

ds work by

a convenrional pairing of

sound and

mea

ning

is

not ba

nal or unc

ontr

over

sial

. In the

ear

lies

t surviving deb

ate on linguistics, P

lato

has Hermogenes say

, "No

thin

g ha

s it

s name byn

atur

e, but onl

y by

usa

ge and

custom." Cra

tylu

s di

sagr

ees:

"There

is a correctness of name exi

stin

g by

nature

for everything: a name is not simply that which a number of people jo

intl

y ab ee

to cal

l a th

ing.° Cr

aryl

us is a creationist, and

su~ests that "

a power gr

eate

r th

an

man assib ed the fir

st names to things." Tod

ay, those ~vho see a cor

recr

ness

of

names mig

ht att

ribu

te it i

nste

ad to on

omat

opoe

ia (wo

rds such as cr

ash an

d oi

nk

that

sou

nd lik

e wh

at they mean) or to sound sym

boli

sm (words such as sneer,

cantnnkerous, and melliflurnis that naturally ca

ll to mind the

thi

ngs they mean).

Toda

y th

is debate ha

s been resolved in favor of Hermogenes' conventional

pair

ing.

Ear

ly in th

is cen

tury

Fer

dina

nd de Sa

ussu

re, a founder of

mod

ern

lin-

guistics, called such pa

irin

g the ar

bitr

ary si

gn and

made it a cornerstone of the

study of la

ngua

ge.'

Ono

mato

poei

a and sound symbolism certainly east, bu

t they

are asterisks to

the far

mor

e important pr

inci

ple of the

arb

itra

ry sign—or els

e we

woul

d understand the words in every fo

reig

n la

ngua

ge ins

tinc

tive

ly, a

nd never

need

a dic

tion

ary for ou

r ov

en! Even the

mos

t ob

viou

sly onomatopoeic words—

those for animal sou

nds—

are no

tori

ousl

y un

pred

icta

ble,

wit

h pigs oinking boo

-

boo in Jap

an and dogs barking go

ng gong in In

done

sia.

Sound sym

boli

sm, f

or it

s

part

, was

no fr

iend

of th

e Am

eric

an woman in the th

roes

of la

bor who ove

rhea

rd

what

struck he

r as the mos

t be

auti

ful word in the English la

ngua

ge and

named

her ne

wbor

n da

ught

er Meconium, th

e me

dica

l te

rm for fe

tal ex

crem

ent.

'

17xe In

finite Lib

rary

13

Though sim

ple,

the principle of the arbitrary sign is a po

werf

ul too

l for ge

t-ting thoughts from hea

d to head. Chi

ldre

n begin to lea

rn words bef

ore their

firs

t birthday, and by

their sec

ond they hoover them up at a rate of on

e every

two ho

urs.

By the time they ent

er school children command 13,

000 words,

and th

en the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them fro

m both

speech and pri

nt. A typ

ical

hig

h-sc

hool

gra

duat

e knows about 60,

000 wo

rds;

ali

tera

te adult, pe

rhap

s twice th

at num

ber.3 Pe

ople

rec

ogni

ze words sw

2ftly. The

mean

ing of

a spoken word is ac

cess

ed by a listener's bra

in in about a fifth of

ase

cond

, be

fore

the

speaker has fin

ishe

d pr

onou

ncin

g it.~ The meaning of a

printed wo

rd is registered even more quiclly, in

about an ei

ghth

of a second.>

Peop

le produce wor

ds alm

ost as rap

idly

: It

takes the

bra

in about a quarter of a

seco

nd to fi

nd a word to

name an object, and about another qu

arte

r of

a sec-

ond to prob am the mouth and ton

gue to

pronounce it

.bThe arbitrary sign wo

rks because a speaker and a li

sten

er can cal

l on identi-

cal entries in

their men

tal di

ctio

nari

es. The speaker has a thought, makes a

soun

d, and cou

nts on the

lis

tene

r to

hear the so

und an

d recover that thought.

To dep

ict an

entry in the me

ntal

dic

tion

ary we need a way of sh

owin

g the entry

itself, as wel

l as its

sou

nd and

meaning. The entry for a wor

d is sup

ply it

s ad

-dr

ess in

one's memory, li

ke the location of the

boldfaced entry for a wor

d in

are

al dic

rion

ary.

It's

con

veni

ent to use

an English letter sequence such as r-o -s-e

to sta

nd for the entry, a

s long as we remember thi

s is jus

t a mnemonic tag that

allo

ws us to

remember which wor

d the entry co

rres

pond

s to

; any

symbol, such

as 42759, would do

just

as well. To dep

ict the word's sound, we can use

a pho-

neti

c no

tati

on, su

ch as [roz].'~ The mea

ning

of a wo

rd is a li

nk to an

entry in

the pe

rson

's men

tal encyclopedia, which captures the

per

son'

s concept of

aro

se. For co

nven

ienc

e we can symbolize it with a picture, su

ch as 4~. So a

ment

al dic

tion

ary entry looks so

meth

ing like this:

rose so

und: roz

meaning: ~

*Thi

s bo

ok use

s a simplified pho

neti

c no

tati

on similar to that found in dictionaries, i

n which

the long vow

els a in bait, e in

beet, i in

bit

e, o in boat, and

u in bo

ot are

distinguished Ero

m the

short v

owel

s d in ]g

at, e in

bei, i

in bi

t, o in pot, and u in but. t1

n un

ador

ned a stands fo

r the

firs

tvowel in

fath

er or papa. The

sgm

bol s

is use

d for [he neu

tral

vow

el in

the

suffit of melted and

Rose

's (e

.g., nz

elti

ci, t

o_rz), a ve

rsio

n of th

e vowel s

omet

imes

cal

led s

chwa.

"Long vo

wel,

" "short vo

wel,

" and other te

chni

cal te

rms in

lin

guis

tics

, psy

chol

ingu

isti

cs, a

ndne

uros

cien

ce ar

e defined in

the Glossary:

4

~ Words and Rules

A final component is the word's part of speech, or b ammatical category,

which for rose is

noun (N):

rose so

und: roz

meaning: ̀~

part of speech: N

And that brings us to the second tri

ck behind the vast ex

pres

sive

power of

language.

People do not ju

st blurt out isolated words but rat

her combine them into phrases

and sentences, in which the meaning of the combination can be inferred from

the meanings of the words and the way they ar

e arranged. We talk not merely of

roses, but of the red rose, proud rose, sad rose of al

l my days. We can express our

feelings about bread and roses, guns and roses, the War of the Ro

ses, or days of

~adne and roses. We can say that lovely is

the rose, ro

ses ar

e red, or a rose is

a rose

is a rose. When we combine words, their arrangement is

crucial: Violets are red,

roses are blue, though containing

all the inb edients of the familiar verse, means

something very different. We all know the difference between young tivonzen

looking for husbands and husbands loolzing for young women, and that looking

women husbands yoticng for doesn't mean anything at all.

Inside everyone's head there must be a code or protocol or set of rules that

specifies how words may be arranged into meaningful combinations. Modern

linguists call it a grammar, sometimes a generative grnnzmnr to distinguish it

from the grammars used to teach foreign languages or to teach the dos and

don'ts of fo

rmal

prose.

A grammar assembles words into phrases according to the words' part-of-

speech categories, such as noun and verb. To highlight a word's ca

tego

ry and

reduce visual clutter often it is convenient to omit the sound and meaning and

put the ca

tegory

label on top:

N rose

Similarly, the word a, an article or cleternainer, would look like this:

THe Inf

init

e Library

I S

det

f aThey can then be joined into the phrase a rose by a rule that jo

ins a determiner

to a noun to yield a noun phrase (NP). The rule can be shown as a set of con-

nected branches; this one says "a noun phr

ase may be composed of a deter-

miner followed by a noun':

NP

det

N

The symbols at the bottom of the branches are

like slots into which words may

be plugged, as long as the words have the same labels growing out of their

tops. Here is the result, the phrase a rose:

NP

det

N

a

rose

With just two more rules we can build a complete toy grammar. One rule de-

fines apredicate or verb phrase (VP); the rule says that a verb phrase may con-

sist of a verb followed by it

s direct

object, a noun phrase:

VP

V

NP

The other rule defines the sentence itself (S). This rule says that a sentence

may be composed from a noun phrase (the subject) followed by a verb phrase

(the predicate):

/ \

NP

VP

When words are plugged int

o phrases according to these rules, and the

phrases are plugged into bigger phrases, we get a complete sentence, such as

A rose is a rose:

6 ~

Words and Rules

S

NP

VP

/ \ / \

det

N V

NP

/ \

a rose is det N

a rose

Other parts of the rules, not shown here, sp

ecify the meaning of the new com-

bination. For example, the complete NP rule says that the meaning of the yel-

lmv

rose of Tea:as is based on the meaning of rose, which is called the head of

the phrase, and that the other words modify the head in various ways: yellmv

specifies a distinctive wait, Texas its location.

These rules, though crude, illustrate the fantastic expressive power made

available by grammar. First, the rules are prod2~ctive. By specifying a string of

finds of words rather than a string of actual words, the rules allow us to assem-

ble new sentences on the fly and not regurgitate preassembled cliches—and

that allows us to convey unprecedented combinations of ideas. Though eve

often speak of roses being red, we could talk about violets being red

if the

desire came over us (perhaps to announce a new hybrid), because the rule

allows us to insert violets into the N slot j

ust as easily as roses.

Second, the symbols contained by the rules are symbolic and hence abstract.

The rule doesn't say, "A sentence may begin with a bunch of words referring to

a kind of flower"; rather, it

says, "A sentence may begin with an NP," where

NP is a symbol or variable that can be replaced by any noun, just as x or y in a

mathematical formula can be replaced by any number. We can use the rules to

talk about flowers and their colors and smells, but we can just as easily use

them to talk about karma or quarks or floob-boober-bab-boober-bubs (who, ac

-

cording to Dr. Seuss, bounce in the water like blubbery tubs).

Third, the rules are combi~aatorial. They don't just have a single slot, like a

fill-in-the-blank exam question; every position in the sentence offers a choice

of words from a lengthy menu. Say everyday English has four determiners (n,

any, one, and tlae) and ten thousand nouns. Then the rule for a noun phrase al-

lows four choices for the determiner, f

ollowed by ten thousand choices for the

head noun, yi

elding 4 x 10,000 = 40,000 ways to utter a noun phrase. The rule

Tlie In

finite Library

~ 7

for a sentence allows these forty thousand subjects to be followed by any of

four thousand verbs, providing x}0,000 x 4,000 = 160,000,000 ways to utter

the first three words of a sentence. Then there are four choices for the deter-

miner of the object (640 million four -word beginnings) followed by ten thou-

sand choices for the head noun of [he object, or 640,000,000 x 10,000 =

6,400,000,000,000 (6.4 trillion) five -word sentences. Suppose it takes five

seconds to produce one of these sentences. '~

o crank them a

ll out, from The

abantionnaent abased tl2e abbey and Tlxe nbandonme~zt abased the abbot, through

The abandonment abased the zoologist, all the ~vay to The zoologist coned the

zoo, would take a million years.

Many such combinations are ungrammatical of course, owing to various

complications I haven't mentioned—£or example, you can't say T7ae Anrofa, a

abandonment, or Tlae abbot abase tke abbey. And most of the combinations are

nonsensical: Abandonments can't abbreviate, and abbeys can't abet. Yet even

with these restrictions the e;cpressive range of a grammar is astonishing. The

psychologist George Miller once conservatively estimated that if speakers keep

a sentence perfectly grammatical and sensible as they choose their words,

their menu at each point offers an average of about ten choices (at some

points there are many more than ten choices; at others, only one or two). %That

works out to one hundred thousand five-word sentences, one million siY-word

sentences, ten million seven-word sentences, and so on. A sentence of twenty

v~rords is not at all uncommon (the preceding sentence has twenty words be-

foreand so on), and there are about one hundred million trillion of them in En-

glish. For comparison, that is about a hundred times the number of seconds

since the birth of the universe.

Grammar is an example of a combinatorial system, in which a small inven-

tory of elements can be assembled by rules into an immense set of distinct ob-

jects~ Combinatorial systems obey what Miller calls the Exponential Principle:

The number of possible combinations grows e~cponentially (geometrically)

with the size of the combination.g Combinatorial systems can generate incon-

ceivably vast numbers of products. Every kind of molecule in the universe is

assembled from ahundred-odd chemical elements; every protein building

block and catalyst in the living world

is assembled from just twenty amino

acids. Even when the number of products is smaller, a combinatorial system

can capture them all and provide enormous sa«ngs in storage space. Eight bits

define 23 = 256 distinct bytes, which is more than enough for all the numerals,

punctuation marks, and upper- and lowercase letters in our writing system.

This allows computers to be built out of idenrical specks of silicon that can be