WALLACE L.

CHAFE

Wallace Chafe, in the beginning of your book Meaning and the Structure of Language 1
you explicitly stated that you consider your theory as a genuine alternative to current
trends in American linguistics. Do you still hold this statement ?
- I don't believe I said exactly that, but rather that linguistics was in need of new
alternatives, and that I hoped to provide at least a few ideas that might be useful along
the way. All I would want to say about my own work is that I have constantly been
looking for a better understanding of language. I have been trying to pick up whatever
is valuable from other sources, but at the same time to put together ideas of my own -
it is just a continuous struggle. I do not feel I have arrived at anything at this point
that I am very satisfied with. About the mid-sixties, the time that Chomsky's Aspects 2
appeared, I thought that it would perhaps be valuable for me to put down in the form
of a book the thoughts I had about language. They were quite different from those
represented by Aspects. I finished a first draft of my book in 1966 but I continued to
work on it for three more years and finally sent it to the publisher in 1969. By the time
it actually appeared in print, a lot of points I wanted to make had already come out
in other ways: the generative semantic movement had already started at that time.
The general point was that the base of language ought to be semantic rather than
syntactic. This is the point I tried to make from the early sixties onwards but it only
appeared in the open after 1967. When it appeared in my book it had already been in
the air for some time from other sources too. I did publish an article, "Language as
Symbolization", 3 and a review 4 of Katz' Philosophy of Language in which I tried to
make the same kind of point. But the book was an attempt to follow through with
this idea in a fairly detailed way. I tried to avoid the sort of formalization of language
structure that was developed at M.I.T. and to build one that was more semantically
based. I am able to see the book now in a larger framework and to place the form of
representation I had in the book against a larger background.
After the book was finished I began thinking seriously about discourse structure, i.e.,

1
W. L. Chafe, Meaning and the Structure of Language (Chicago, 1970).
2
N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).
3
W. L. Chafe, "Language as Symbolization", Language 43 (1967), 57-91.
4
W. L. Chafe, "Review of J. J. Katz, The Philosophy of Language", International Journal of
American Linguistics 33 (1967), 248-254.
2 WALLACE CHAFE

about units which extend beyond the boundaries of sentences. I found that I really
needed to get involved in such overwhelmingly large questions as the nature of human
knowledge, the extent to which knowledge can be formalized. Those questions arrive
in a particularly puzzling way as soon as you start looking at larger structures of
language than just simple sentences.

Does that mean that your theory is still an alternative to the other rival trends in
linguistics ?
- I would like to keep the good things in the theory as they stood several years ago
but, as I said, I would like to place them within a larger framework. I would like to
clarify what exactly is contained in a semantic representation and what aspect of
language it is that it represents. By nature, I do not like schools in linguistics - we all
are searching for the truth about language. I would not like to have my book become
a sort of basis for any kind of dogma, because I would not accept such a dogma my-
self. However, that is the way things go. This is for example what happened with the
various formulations of Chomsky's Aspects and before that of Syntactic Structures,
which became sort of a paradigm within which everybody worked. That might be
good in some ways but also tends to hamper imaginative progress. I would not par-
ticularly care to see my own book used in that way but just taken as possible sugges-
tions for developing a better understanding of language.

Your scientific autobiography may be very interesting and clarify certain points. What,
originally, were your criticisms against American structuralism ?
- As I mentioned in the book, I was dissatisfied with the structuralist model I had
available to me for working on American-Indian languages. I happened to work with
Iroquois languages, which have an extremely complicated phonology, and I felt
particularly pleased by the development of generative phonology that allowed me to
account for the facts in terms of rules, in a way that was not possible in the structuralist
framework where all we had were phonemes and allophones. That alone did not seem
to account for what I found in these languages.
In the area of grammar and syntax, it seemed that long words in this polysynthetic
language contained items which represented semantic elements - you might have a
word that consisted of eight morphemes, each of which seemed to have some kind of
meaning - but there were also a lot of idiomatic expressions where morphemes were
put together in an arbitrary way to reflect some unitary meaning which we would not
anticipate from the meanings of the parts of the expression. This is a familiar problem
but it made me think about how this particular language, and of course English too,
was used to express meanings. The restriction to phonetic data with just an occasional
look at semantic facts was what bothered me very much in structuralism. That really
is the heart of the whole problem. It was exactly the same thing that bothered me
about the early M.I.T. school, which seemed not to provide any useful ways of dealing
with meanings. It surprised me that a lot of people in both psychology and philosophy
 WALLACE CHAFE 3
seemed to feel at that time that the M.I.T. trend was a breakthrough, providing a lot
of insight into how language dealt with meaning. But this did not seem to me to be
the case. So, I needed to look somewhere else and develop ideas of my own.

How do you see the dependence of the earlier Chomsky on his predecessors, the American
structuralists ?
- I guess there was a fairly strong dependence. There seems to have been a line of
historical development in linguistics which ran through Zellig Harris to Chomsky.
But it is an oversimplification to put it in those terms. Structuralism was concerned
with surface structures and Chomsky did linguistics a great service in making clear
that surface structures could not be explained in their own terms only, but required
reference to something else which lay behind or beneath the surface structure. The
real crux of the matter is of course how this should be represented. That really has
not been solved. First there were kernel sentences, then there were deep structures,
and more recently semantic structures of various kinds. Even that is not the right way
to look at things.

You oppose your own theory to transformational grammar as semanticism to syn-

tacticism. Is that not a very strong claim ?
- In the mid-sixties I thought there was no real justification for positing a level, a
stage, something in language which coincided with the so-called deep structure which
the transformationalists were working with. I used the term syntacticism simply to
refer to that kind of linguistics in which one assumed an autonomous level of syntax.
It seemed to me then and still seems to me that there is nothing to be gained from
hypothesizing the existence of such a kind of representation in language. Where
surface structure may be a well defined level - it is written down on paper in words
and sentences - if you try to develop something that underlies surface structure, there
is no good reason to think that something like a Chomsky kind of deep structure is
very much help. Semanticism hypothesized that things were determined on a level
which was closer to meaning; that seems to me to be correct. I have never found a
really good demonstration that a syntactic deep structure is a useful thing to have.

The solution of an interpretative semantic component as it was sketched by Katz and

Fodor 5 and by Katz and Postal6 did not satisfy you ?
- No. It still depends on a syntactic level on which the interpretative level is based.
I suppose all of this has something to do with the distinction between competence
and performance. Whenever one said the kind of thing I was trying to say at that time,
he was accused of being concerned with performance rather than competence.
Whenever facts were pointed out that seemed to conflict with the syntactic level, it was
5
J. J. Katz and J. Fodor, "The Structure of a Semantic Theory", Language 39 (1963), 170-210.
6
J. J. Katz and P. M. Postal, An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Description (Cambridge, Mass.,
1964).
4 WALLACE CHAFE

said that deep structure was not concerned with performance but only with compe-
tence. I really think that this competence-performance distinction has been a great
hindrance in linguistics. It has not helped in our understanding of language at all,
in fact it has been used as a rationalization for avoiding all sorts of important, relevant,
and interesting questions about language. Dissociating language use from formal
structure does not seem to me a profitable line to follow. What I have been concerned
with is building a model of language which is related to how language is used and I do
not see anything wrong with that. It has been a mistake not to look at language in
functional terms rather than in terms of abstract formal structure. A lot of what
happened in the sixties happened because many linguists were very fond of formal
structure as such; they liked to work with formalism and were much more concerned
with that than what was really going on when people talked.

But I believe that Chomsky speaks also about semantic competence, not only about
syntactic competence. The structure of meaning belongs to competence also ...
- Yes, that is true. I don't have too much to say on that point. He may have said that,
but he actually has not, as far as I can see, provided very much for a useful approach
to questions of that kind. It is really not my intention to be critical of a lot of other
linguists. We are all confronted with a very complex and mysterious thing - language.
A lot of different avenues for understanding it are open to us. What I object to is the
tendency which is so strong in American linguistics to take only one approach to
language. Structuralists were extremely narrow and dogmatic and the same has been
true of the transformationalists. There is a single line, a sort of party line which has to
be followed in order to belong in the field of linguistics.

One of the great advantages of your linguistic theory is that it is 'natural'. Meaning is
what language is all about. Do you see this common sense definition of language in
opposition to the more sophisticated trends in linguistics ?
- Naturalness and performance are really comparable terms. They both refer to lan-
guage as it is actually used when people talk and not to some abstract structure under-
lying it. Formalism is fine and I am interested in that too. But people have rushed
into formalism before they really have known what it is. They have tried to formalize
and then they have become slaves of a particular formalism; it can capture a whole
generation of scholars.

Are your notions of transformation and of derivation of a sentence comparable with the
same notions as used by transformationalists ?
- 1 am particularly concerned with what is psychologically valid. I certainly have been
sceptical about whether many transformations that have been proposed within
transformational grammar have any kind of psychological validity. A lot of them seem
to be the result of linguists' games, of playing around with the system that has been
developed, and do not reflect anything that bears on what is going on in the mind of
 W A L L A C E CHAFE 5

the speaker of the language. Language provides a kind of filter for thoughts, if I can
put it in those terms. Whether the filter should be described in terms of transforma-
tions, as is presently understood, is t o me the important question. I don't really know
a satisfactory answer to it right now.

You accept levels of deep structure and derivation of sentencesfrom those deep structures.
Is this a departure from or a solidarity with the more common transformational opinion ?
- In some sense my semantic structures are comparable to the general idea of deep
structure or semantic structure in other devices. I am at present much concerned about
whether semantic structures of the sort that I represented in the book do represent
something that is valid within language.

Do linguistic transformations have psychological reality?

- This is what I am questioning. The same question has arisen within phonology
where what is going on is perhaps a little clearer. It becomes much more complex and
difficult in the semantic-syntactic area. I suspect that some of these things have
psychological reality and others don't.

Can one call your present linguistic activity 'psychosemantics' ?

- It is a name that I made up. I think of this now as a branch of psycholinguistics.
Psycholinguistics has a long history going back to Wundt and Buhler, etc., but there
has been a recent resurgence of interest in psycholinguistics since the fifties. It par-
ticularly focused at first on attempts to find psychological confirmation for trans-
formational grammar. A lot of work was done in that area which does not seem to
have produced anything of lasting interest. Since then the main focus of attention has
shifted to child language, language acquisition. It would also be useful and eventually
necessary to have another branch of psycholinguistics which might appropriately be
called psychosemantics. Psychologists and linguists are trying to get at the same sorts
of things at the end; that is, we are trying to understand how the mind works.
Linguists do this through language; sometimes they seem to be more interested in
language than in the mind, but ultimately I don't think you can understand how
language works without understanding how the mind works. The psychological
concerns and the linguistic concerns will converge and there really will not be any
distinctions between the two except that the psychosemantic approach would look at
psychological questions through language, which is a principal avenue to under-
standing the human mind. Within American linguistics at least this is new. The anti-
mentalism which was so important for a long time destroyed any attempt like this
- and I think transformational grammar in its orthodox form also avoided this.

Did Chomsky not call linguistics a subpart of psychology ?

- That is true.