Geoffrey Sampson (1) (1944–)

I was lucky to come across this book in the humanities bookstore of my local university. Every chapter has given me a mini "Eureka!" moment, which is very rare for a proceedings-style book.

In linguistics, it has long been taken as an axiom that all languages are equally complex. The chapters of this book all challenge this assumption. From showing that the idea itself arose in the late fifties, without any real quantitative or qualitative research behind it to back it up, to comparing two closely related languages (Elfdalian and Standard Swedish) and showing that one is definitely more complex than the other, to showing that languages (creoles, that is) grow more complex and can become so by overtly and analytically marking information that no other languages mark and not through growing inflections, to showing that literate registers grow out of formal registers, that in turn are more complex than informal registers, to discussing whether it makes sense at all to talk about "overall complexity" for any language... It is very tempting to whisper "paradigm shift".

This is certainly the most important book I have found so far this year, and possibly for several years to come.… (más)

I'd recommend this to anyone interested in the issue of whether or not language is instinctual. Sampson scores some hits against those believing that language is inborn. I admit that I'm a pushover for discrediting Noam Chomsky. I consider him to be a philosopher, rather than a scientist, since he doesn't empirically test his ideas. Logic is a valuable tool, but ideas that originally seemed logical litter the path of science when they don't stand up to testing.

Sampson is particularly strong when he catches his opponents making assumptions rather than basing their arguments on actual data. He searches databases like the British National Corpus, that includes samples of everyday speech, to show that many forms of speech aren't as rare as was supposed, and it is therefore more likely that a child could learn them by observation. He also catches them in overgeneralizations about things that are frequently, but not always true.

Still, in the end I am not convinced that he is right. He argues that the idea that language is entirely learned, like games or dances, is the "commonsense" position. I don't know about that: I have read: that in the Middle Ages, efforts were made to isolate infants from adult speech in the belief that they would then speak the original language. And I am unaware of any culture that does not have a language. Even deaf infants babble.

I also think that Sampson overstates the "instinct" position, to set up a straw man. He says: "All of us, surely, would rather be what most of us have supposed we are: creatures capable of coming to terms with whatever life throws at us because of our ability to create novel ideas [...] Who would not prefer this picture to that which portrays biology as allotting to the human mind a range of available settings, like a fully featured washing machine [...] The former concept of Man is far nobler. The evidence suggests that it is far more accurate." I don't think that most people are arguing that either all behavior is instinctive or it is all learned. The "instinct" proposal still leaves room for the great variety that we find in languages, and it doesn't necessarily mean that any other behavior is instinctive.

So I think that Sampson does the noble work of pointing out weaknesses in the instinct language, and good scientists will thank him, even if it is through gritted teeth, for helping them perfect their data collection. On the other hand, he has chiefly presented arguments against his opponents, not for his own position.… (más)

I enjoy looking at both side of an argument; as an introductory linguistics course I am taking has highlighted this book as a good way of looking at the other side of the Chomskyan claims I swiftly ordered my copy, fully expecting several evenings of intellectual challenge and brain stretching. The book has fully disappointed me. It is a pamphlet rather than a scientific work.

I'll propose that the first paragraph of the book is an acid test for the potential reader. It reads as follows: "the English language, and other languages, are institutions like country dancing or the game of cricket: cultural creations that individuals may learn during their lifetimes, if they happen to be born into the appropriate cultures, but to which no one is innately predisposed".
If you're struck by the fact you hardly know anybody who doesn't speak a language (I know nobody having chosen to not learn one during her lifetime), but probably know several people who don't play cricket you'll be hard pressed to find a satisfying explanation.
If on the other hand, you find this claim fairly self obvious (maybe you don't know anybody who doesn't play cricket for instance) and are in fact scandalized anybody could think otherwise, you'll probably enjoy the book.… (más)

There's nothing better than seeing an overconfident favourite getting a proper seeing to from an unfancied underdog.

All the same, when best-selling MIT and Harvard-credentialised psycho-linguist Steven Pinker's book "the Language Instinct" - a work feted far and wide and rarely challenged in polite circles - is subjected to critical treatment by an curmudgeonly British professor from an unfashionable second tier university in the home counties, it is a hopeful chap indeed who thinks an upset might be on the cards.

Pinker, after all, has the weight of Noam Chomsky (self styled most important intellect on the planet) behind him, and rates consistently favourable mentions from the literary review sections of important newspapers and that peculiar clique of populist science writers (Dan Dennett, Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins among others).

The best you could say for Sampson, on the other hand, is that he lacks profile: His tenure is at the University of Sussex - yes, there is one - and the profile he does have isn't the sort most people would want: as far back as 1977, Christopher Hitchens described him as "an academic nonentity who made various other incautious allegations [about Noam Chomsky's political views] and who later ... strolled into the propellers and was distributed into such fine particles that he has never been heard from again." Ouch.

That's all ancient history, though, and the pleasant surprise is that over the last thirty years the plucky little Britisher has made a full recovery from his encounter with the propellers and is in fine enough fettle to give said global linguistic superstar a good old-fashioned intellectual walloping. Even read alone, Pinker's book is built on a wobbly edifice, but with Sampson's expert guide, it looks positively idiotic. Sampson is systematic: he sets up each of Pinker's arguments (such as they are), represents them fairly (I read Pinker's original concurrently to check) and then, like a gentleman cricketer on the village green dispatches each of them deftly to the boundary through extra-cover.

I'm really not sure why Geoffrey Sampson's book hasn't received more attention: possibly the author's history (he seems to made a number of "incautious" political statements over his life and doesn't seem to be the recanting type), but also because it swims bravely against an intellectual tide: Sampson is - though I don't think he expressly says it - a relativist:

"What the language learner is trying to bring his tacit theory into correspondence with is not some single, consistent grammar inhering in a collective national psyche, the sort of mystic entity that a sociologist such as Emile Durkheim would call a "social fact". Rather, he is trying to reconstruct a system underlying the usage of various speakers to whom he is exposed, and these speakers will almost certainly be working at any given time with non-identical tacit theories of their own - so that there will not be any wholly coherent and irrefutable grammar available to be formulated"

Advocating relativism, as I think Sampson coherently and convincingly does, has the misfortune to be about as incautious as criticising Noam Chomsky these days, so perhaps Sampson's card is marked and that's that. All the same, the passage cited above is beautifully put, and by itself is more persuasive than Steven Pinker's whole book.

All the same, who's laughing now? Probably not G. Sampson esq., as he strolls from the wicket at stumps, having carried his bat valiantly, but not having managed to save the innings. But up on the grassy bank, this cricket connoisseur stand to applaud this stylish, defiant knock.

Well batted, sir.… (más)