André Martinet/9 – We don’t care about deep structures

Conversazione con André Martinet

Noam Chomsky

What is then your position in respect to Chomsky?

You may have noticed that Chomsky does not exist for me. No Chomsky, just because I think he’s not scientific. Just, he decided that you cannot have a sentence in any language unless you have a verb and a subject, which is ridiculous. In a lot of languages we don’t have that. Even in our own languages.

When you have a c’è in Italian, it is just indicative of something. Where do you have the verb and the subject? Where is the verb? You can’t say è is the verb, it is a tool, just a tool, there is no need to have the subject.

Those people are universalists, that damned feature of modern linguistics!

Those Chomskian people, what are they? They are English-speakers, so they say anything which resembles English is basic, is a deep structure or not and so on. And this is just wrong. We don’t care about deep structures, because before we decide on deep structures we have first of all to see what the actual structure of every language we meet is. So, let’s forget about deep structures. Maybe some day we will revert to it. When we have come across many many different languages, we may come to the conclusion that at least some features are probably best adapted to mankind than others. But this is not the way our friend Rasmussen did it yesterday*.

*Rasmussen, Michael, “Hjelmslev et le rationalisme”, San Marino, 12 ottobre 1993, convegno Hjelmslev oggi

Leggi gli altri post dell’intervista:

André Martinet/1 Communication is our basic relevancy

André Martinet/2 Language articulates what we feel into a succession of items

André Martinet/3 How to describe a language

André Martinet/4 Choosing words

André Martinet/5 Amalgamations

André Martinet/6 Semiotics

André Martinet/7 Economy

André Martinet/8 La Societé Internationale de Linguistique fonctionnelle