the first question mister Chomsky comes from Chris Christoph Gudrow how have your ideas on universal grammar changed over the years are you more or less convinced to the theory now then you were initially ok well there's there's a lot of confusion about the notion universal grammar you never universal grammar had a traditional meaning but in modern linguistics last 50 years or so it's had a technical meaning which is not and related to the traditional meaning when is not identical either universal grammer's just the name for the theory over the genetic component of the language faculty I'll I mean transparently there some genetic component right there's a reason say way my granddaughter a reflexively identified some part of her environment as language related which is no small trick nobody knows outer duplicate that a and then more or less reflexively picked up the capacity that we're all now using whereas her pet the say kitten were chimpanzee your song were murder whatever it may be with exactly the same in goods couldn't even take the first step can identify party the environment is language related obviously not the later steps whether two possible answers to how that happens one is it's a miracle the other is there's a she has some specific genetic capacity that's like the capacity that Hatter grew arms and not wings would say just some fixed Berhad a mammalian visual system but not a insect visual system know if this is not controversial for anything except human higher mental faculties for some reason when people investigate human higher mental faculties they have to be insane you know you can't accept the approach that we take to everything else in the world the kind with the methodological dualism everything else in the world we study by the standard methods of science but we talk about human higher mental faculties we have become mystics so therefore the controversy about the existence %uh universal grammar which is like a bit which means a controversy about whether there is some genetic property that distinguishes humans from everybody else a which leads to these the ability to do doing what we're not doing but there shouldn't be any controversy about that the only question is what is it well there have been theories about it from the nineteen fifties when these studies began up to the present and it's a living field so they keep changing so in that sense yes mine use about universal grammar keep changing say when I'll and walked into my office is a graduate student told me I was wrong about everything so okay my own views change no a but the in that sense sure there's going to be constant change until the field is this piercers did or something and it's a long long way to go these are not trivial questions a the that sort of general tendency of change not every link was would agree by any means such personal opinions a in the early stages win the first question was asked seriously about fifty years ago as to how we are capable of doing what we do the all the time how are we capable love understanding producing a expressions which you we've never heard which may have never been uttered in the history language in do it over infinite Ranger were very strange properties that they have a soon as you look at them how can we do it the only answer seemed to be that each of us has a highly intricate computational system in the brain which yields these very specific results but that then poses a paradox because it must be the case that we all all humans have the same genetic capacitor with marginal variations the reason it is if you take girl a child from say build a hundred gather tribe in the Amazon and the child is raised in I'll Cambridge Mass it'll the perfect made this become old graduate student studying quantum physics at MIT with no different from anyone else him and conversely so we all have the same capacity as were less understood why the capacity developed a very recently an evolutionary time probably in some window between 200,000 and fifty thousand years ago something like that and that's just the flicker when I'm so whatever happened never changed except extremely marginally so we're all fundamentally identical for all practical purposes human genetic variation is very slight anyway superficial differences with not very profound foreign than outside the extraterrestrial observer looking at us the way we look at frogs which is only one hume and one language with minor variations a so on the one hand this gotta be uniform the other hand the it seemed to be the case that each particular language had a highly intricate and complex system rules computational system and they're very different from one another and that is a paradox in fact I'll serious paradox well over the years there have been efforts to the deal with the to try to overcome the paradox here a major step was taken in here views on universal grammar at least for many of us did change radically was around 1980 I'll between you're there yeah ones Terfel you when your a different view the matter serve crystallized what's called sometimes called the principles and parameters you the picture that the principle that there are fixed principles which are really invariant nobody has to acquire them there abortive universal grammar and then there's a number options that can be taken call parameters that the child has to pick up from experience and they have to be pretty simple you have to be able pick them up from limited evidence because that's all there is so for example and some languages like English the that's called ahead first language so the verb precedes the object then a preposition proceeds the object to preposition and so on other languages like the Japanese are almost the mirror image the the verb follows the objective being post positions not prepositions and so on so liners are virtually mirror images of each other and you have to septa parameter child has to set the parameter which is %uh my talking English German talking Japanese and that can be to be determined from very simple bater so that's good reasonable to assume a parameter a and the hope was that you could find some finite set of parameters like a a finite switchbox where you set the switch childhood sets which is one way or another and can do it on the basis of fairly simple data and then once this enters into I'll predetermine system with principals you get things which superficially look very different that are actually almost identical on just differing a superficial choices well if you work that out you have solved the paradox too long way to work that out but that made it possible at least to confront the issue seriously without facing an immediate them yourself contradictions and it's sort of a lot older really rich period over research in a query nothing like getting a thousands of years I've history of study of language molest 25-30 years over a wide variety of type logically different languages to new questions at a depth we could never been proposed before sometimes answers a leading to new questions and so on been a very lively period and also raised another question what about the principles where do they come from that affect the choice of parameters where do these things come from if they're in universal grammar this apart in the genetic and down a then had to involve some I'll but not a lot could have evolved because it's two recent no you go back a hundred thousand years there's far as we know nothing a unions had the same I'll anatomy anything that's preserved in the fossil records about same you know hundreds of thousand years back so some small change must have taken place in the in the brain the which somehow allowed the all this the suddenly blossom and pretty soon after that again and evolutionary time like maybe got within two thousand years which is no time at all a human started leaving East Africa nowhere real come from stores and when those so some small group called developed this system and then we'll spread all over the world No girl sensual and saying but what involved in that short period of time cannot have been very complex no wouldn't expect sears is extensive stage is like saying your development world limbs no million two years therefore it would you predict is that some other principal external to language maybe some the principal nature the principle of computational efficiency or something like that which is not specific to language interacted with a small mutations which just gave rise to the the universal grammar well that sets forth a new goal research to ask to see if you can determine that the principles themselves a up do not have the intricacy that they appeared to have but are actually the result love application of non linguistic contracting non maybe non-human principles like general principles and computational efficiency to whatever small change took place and the small change was probably the capacity to the Terry out recursive enumeration basically has a unique using the number system for example to take the two things to object already constructed in the mind that make up a new object to them and then keep that processor indefinitely so you get an infinite array of possible expressions each with some semantic interpretation some motive externalization the speech sign whatever may be that would be and the goal would be to try to show that that was essentially instantaneous once the small mutation took place given the this operation recursive enumeration operation with allows you to create a discrete infinity expression structured expressions well that's at least feasible picture the trick is to sure that's true true or how close it is to true we can you cut away at the apparent complexity the principles ensure that they can actually be accounted for in terms of a general principal so that hold for organisms generally perhaps and maybe even elsewhere in the physical world and that are instantly you're almost instantly applied once the original movies made into a whatever small move it was to produce the capacity for recursive enumeration well that's a goal don't far from being attained with West 15 twenty years there's been considerable progress towards there's a lot of things that it seemed twenty years ago you had to assign to the genetic and Delmon have no now been ruler plausibly shown to be a possible consequences if just application particularly prince was a computational efficiency to a system which had only the ability to constructing an infinite hierarchy expressions and that we don't know enough about the brain to know that might happen but that could have been a very small mutation just changing something in somebody's gino and then spreading through the small breeding group that so that the in that respect that the its its it's a goal you know and steps have been taken towards it but you would expect that something like that or to be true just from the what's known about the media history over the a evolution over that Homo sapiens very recent times without much opportunity for selection have had any effect maybe a small effect with not much so that so I think I'll it's in that lets the tendency ok thinking at least my thinking and some other many others a on healthy reserve universal grammar changed but the idea that there is universal grammar that exists that can't be controversial unless you believe in magic no for the elementary reasons that I mentions