Proverbiallinguist Email Series 2 2004

On Chomsky’s Explanatory Adequacy and Descriptive Adequacy and Proverb

Analysis: A Ka:rmik Linguistic Review 2
Chilukuri Bhuvaneswar, CIEFL, Hyderabad, India

Noam Chomsky is the pioneer of Transformational-Generative Grammar ( T- G )

and became a celebrity with his rejection of behaviourism in his famous review of
Skinner's Verbal Behaviour (1957).His theory first proposed as in Syntactic
Structures (1957) has undergone significant revisions in Aspects of the Theory of
Syntax (1965) ,Lectures on Government and Binding (1981),The Barriers
(1995a), and The Minimalist Programme (1995b). First, he proposed that syntax is
autonomous and later revised his position by incorporating semantics also as an
important component. Second, he proposed that there are two structures in syntax:
surface and deep in addition to the logical and phonetic forms but later in his latest
version of the theory, called Minimalism , abandoned them bringing in a radical
departure from his earlier position. Thus, his theory is unstable but it still accepts the
following important criteria specified for any adequate theory of grammar:
explanatory adequacy; maximally constrained rules; learnability ; and minimalism.

As the focus of our research is an analysis of proverbs and our quest is to find a
linguistic theory that can provide a comprehensive and principled account of the
divergent properties of proverbs, let us examine T-G and see if it can do so in terms
of the important criteria mentioned above.

i. EXPALNATRY ADEQUACY

Radford (1988:30 ) defines the term explanatory adequacy as follows:

" (44) A linguistic theory attains explanatory adequacy just in case it provides a
descriptively adequate grammar for every natural language, and does so in terms of
a maximally constrained
set of universal principles which represent psychologically plausible natural
principles of mental computation."

In other words, any adequate linguistic theory should be universally valid,

psychological real, and maximally constrained. If add minimalism also into the term,
we get a fourth important condition
into the theory.

Let us take these concepts into consideration and examine whether T-G satisfies
them for an analysis of proverbs.

i.a. DESCRIPTIVE ADEQUACY AND UNIVERSALITY

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According to Chomsky ( as quoted in Radford 1988: 1-2 ) , any detailed study of

language ultimately seeks to develop the three inter-related theories of language: 1)
structure; 2) acquisition; and 3) use. In the case of T-G, " Chomsky has devoted
himself primarily to the study of language structure rather than language use "
(ibid.4).In other words Chomsky " focused almost exclusively on the task of
attempting to characterize grammatical rather than pragmatic competence" (ibid.).

According to Chomsky (Essays 1977a: 40 ) , pragmatics is concerned ith the role

played by non-linguistic information such as background knowledge and personal
beliefs in our use of sentences (see also Radford 1988: 3) and pragmatic competence
is related to Performance which is "the actual use of language in concrete situations'
(Chomsky. Aspects (1965), p.4).In contrast, grammatical competence is "the speaker-
hearer's knowledge' (ibid).

An application of these concepts as understood by Chomsky poses problems in the

interpretation of proverbs. Proverbs are language and therefore we can develop a
theory of their language structure,
acquisition and use. Let us take the following example and see what grammatical
competence is involved in interpreting it:

(1) Why buy the cow when you get the milk free?

T-G fulfills the conditions of both the observational adequacy and descriptive
adequacy as defined by Radford (1988: 28) since it correctly specifies that this
sentence is syntactically, semantically, morphologically, and phonologically well-
formed in the English language and also appears to properly describe " the syntactic,
semantic, morphological, and phonological structure of the
sentence(s) in such a way as to provide a principled account of the native speaker's
intuitions about this structure" (ibid.).At the syntactic level it can be considered an
ellipted version of:

(1a) Why (do you (want to) ) buy the cow when you get the milk free?

But on a closer examination of the meaning of the structure, it looks like that T-G
does not do so for the following reasons:

1. This structure gives two readings depending on the context in which it is used.
First, in a possible world situation, when someone wants to buy a cow whose milk
he is getting free , another friend of
him might like to advise him by hinting at the `wastefulness' of such an action: You
are already getting milk and that too freely and so it is a waste to do so. This he does
by a rhetorical question. It can be shown in an imaginary conversation as follows:

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(2a) A (Buyer): That cow is healthy and gives good milk.

I want to buy it (from my friend).

B (Adviser): Why buy the cow when you get the milk free?
[ B knows that A is getting the milk of that cow freely.]

T-G provides the meaning given in this Reading 1 and so it appears that it satisfies
the condition of descriptive adequacy. However, the same sentence gives an entirely
different Reading 2 in a real world situation ( where Reading 1 is also possible in a
different context!) :

(2b) Whenever B ( Elvis Presley ) was interviewed by a reporter (A) regarding his
marriage, he used to answer the question with the sentence (1).

The conversation is given below:

A: Why aren't you married?
B: Why buy the cow when you get the milk free? (Mieder 1992: 123)

In this context, Reading 1 is completely unacceptable. This sentence

gives an entirely new meaning in this context as Reading 2:

(2c) `Why should I marry when I get the benefits of marriage without doing so?'
further meaning `As I get the benefits of marriage without marrying, I think it is a
waste and therefore I am not married.'

To arrive at this meaning, the mere interpretation of the referential meaning of the
sentence and its rhetorical question mode is not enough. There should be an
awareness that this sentence is culturally confirmed as a proverb; that it is used as a
proverb in that context; and that its meaning should be derived by extension of its
prototypical meaning to the context to obtain its contextual meaning (see
Bhuvaneswar 1999 for a discussion of meaning in proverbs).

T-G in its present state of development does not have the theoretical backup to
properly describe the semantic structure of the sentence as a proverb ` in such a way
as to provide a principled account of the native speaker's intuitions about this
structure.' In order to do so, a theory of grammar should not only account for
grammatical competence but also pragmatic competence as well as cultural and
individual competence - pragmatic competence accounts for the context
in which it is used by giving `background knowledge and personal belief ' which by
themselves are not enough; one requires in addition cultural competence to tell him
that it is a proverb with a specific prototypical meaning - otherwise, it becomes a
meaningless sentence there - and individual cognitive competence to match the
utterance with the context to arrive at the meaning. If there is no individual cognitive

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competence, the proverb can be used or understood wrongly. So individual

cognitive competence relates with grammatical as well as pragmatic competence.
However, individual cognitive competence is innate but be brought to better
application by pragmatic exposure.

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