Page 31 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
between the sound |p| in the word 'pot' and in the word 'spot' is
something which a native speaker does not consciously register.
Phonemic differences, conversely, are picked up because they
determine how certain sounds enable the recognition of the
meaning of a word. Phonemes (minimal units of sound) produce
meaning through contrasts: 'mat' and 'rat', for instance, are differ-
entiated by the phonemes that go with their opening consonants.
Another influential figure associated with modern American
linguistics is Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949), the father of beha-
viourism. According to Bloomfield, meaning depends on the prac-
tical context in which an utterance is produced and responded to.
He believed that the meanings of words cannot be precisely
defined because humans do not have a total knowledge of the
things or ideas to which words refer. In various specialist fields, it
can be assumed that certain words are meaningful because they
can be associated with scientifically classified objects (e.g. animals,
plants, minerals). But when we enter the sphere of abstract
concepts, such as 'love' and 'hate', our knowledge is far too hazy
to allow for precise definitions of their meanings. Noam Choms-
ky's first book, Syntactic Structures (1957), was influenced by
Bloomfield and his followers. However, it rejects the behaviourist
framework, according to which language is a product of habits
developed in relation to our environment and to how it conditions
us. This model, argues Chomsky, is unsatisfactory because it does
nothing to explain language's creativity - the faculty, as we have
seen, that enables human beings (and even relatively young ones)
to produce and understand a potentially infinite number of
sentences which they have never come across before and which
cannot, therefore, constitute obvious responses to environmental
stimuli. According to Chomsky, we do not learn how to handle
language purely as a result of environmental influences, for
children actually have an innate knowledge of the universal princi-
ples that govern the structure of human language. The basic prin-
ciples that determine the grammatical rules of disparate languages
are, to a great extent, common to all languages, they are biologi-
cally intrinsic to humans and can therefore be genetically trans-
mitted from generation to generation.
Echoing Saussure's distinction between langue and parole?

6 l*~ See Part I, Chapter 2, The Sign.'

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