Linguist Mark Baker explores the building blocks of language Archived article from Jan 25, 2002 By Phyllis Gottlieb   Mark Baker has devised a means for charting those elements that account for the differences among the world's languages. Photo by Nick Romanenko In 1943, as World War II raged in the Pacific, the Marine Corps deployed one of its most successful secret weapons: Navajo-speaking "Code Talkers." Even the most astute Japanese cryptographers, those who had handily cracked the codes of all previous Allied messages, were baffled by this stream of sound. This phenomenon, writes Mark C. Baker in his new book, "The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar" (Basic Books), "vividly illustrates the fundamental puzzle of linguistics. On the one hand, Navajo must be extremely different from English (and Japanese), or the men listening to the Code Talkers' transmissions would eventually have been able to figure out what they were saying. On the other hand, Navajo must be extremely similar to English (and Japanese), or the Code Talkers could not have transmitted with precision the messages formulated by their English-speaking commanders." Resolving this seeming contradiction is at the root of much modern linguistic research, says Baker, a professor in the department of linguistics and at the Center for Cognitive Science in New Brunswick, whose work was featured in the Science Times section of The New York Times Jan. 15. In his engaging and highly readable book, peppered with vivid examples, Baker walks his reader through the most current theories on how language is structured. Defining parameters The root of the Code Talker paradox, Baker says, can be found in the building blocks of language — what linguists call "parameters." Parameters, he explains, are like the atoms in chemistry. Just as all matter is made up of a finite number of atoms with defined properties, so all languages are made of a finite number of parameters. Although linguists are still working to define these essential elements and, indeed, have yet to reach consensus among themselves on which linguistic differences actually constitute parameters, they have made considerable progress. Baker takes the reader through examples from varying languages to point out how the choice of one parameter or another contributes to similarities and differences in the way speech is structured. For instance, languages can choose whether to require each sentence to have a subject, even if the subject is just a place holder (English: It is raining), or be content to leave the subject out and still consider the sentence complete (Italian: Piove). They can choose a subject-verb-object sentence order, as in English (John read the letter), or a subject-object-verb order, as in Japanese or Navajo (John letter read). They can, as in English, use word order and prepositions to differentiate parts of speech. Or, as in Latin, languages can change the form of a word to indicate grammatical relations. One of Baker's favorite examples is the 33-letter Mohawk word Washakotya'tawitshera-hetkvhta'se', which adds multiple prefixes and suffixes to the verb to express an idea — "He made the thing that one puts on one's body [i.e., the dress] ugly for her" — that requires a whole English sentence. Baker outlines 15 such parameters in "The Atoms of Language" and also explores the complex and interesting ways in which these linguistic choices interact with one another to create languages that superficially seem to have little in common but, in fact, share basic elements. "There's the basic recipe for language and then there are the choices in the recipe," Baker explains, noting that the differences among languages come from making a small number of choices that have large consequences. Indeed, in a comparison of any two languages, researchers are finding that some 90 percent of the structural elements are the same. It's that other 10 percent that makes one language look and feel so very different from another. It's a lot like making bread, Baker suggests. Just a small change in the recipe for crackers — the addition of yeast — makes bread, which is both basically the same and also very different. Creating a hierarchy The idea of parameters has been around since Noam Chomsky's work in the 1980s, when the question generated a lot of excitement as linguists looked at differences among closely related languages, such as French, Italian and Spanish. That took them only so far, however, and it wasn't until about a decade ago that a new generation of linguists, including Baker, reinvigorated the field by locating similar parameters in such disparate tongues as Welsh and Zapotec or English and Indonesian. An expert in Native American languages, especially Mohawk, and African languages, especially Chichewa and Edo, Baker estimates that the 15 parameters discussed in his book represent half of the total number that will eventually be discovered. Scholars familiar with the literature will recognize 12 of them from previous journal articles, but three are posited here for the first time. Also brand-new is Baker's attempt to arrange the parameters in a hierarchy along the lines of chemistry's Periodic Table. He reasoned that if there were only a small number of factors in language, he should be able to put them together on a chart as well. "So it was fun to try to find a way to do that," he recounts. "Actually, the chemists did the same thing," he adds. "Mendeleyev was not the first to ask: ‘In what order should I teach about the elements in my chemistry textbook?' But his attempt to answer the question in a better way did lead him to invent the Periodic Table. It started as a practical issue of presentation. It's a little bit of the same thing here. I wanted to know what was a practical way to present this, and maybe it will mean something," although in this case the final picture looks more like a flow chart than a table. The larger picture Interestingly, in addition to explaining the paradox of the Code Talkers, parameters may hold the clue to the uncanny ability of children to master any language. Researchers now hypothesize that a finite set of rules for language are hard-wired into the brain so children need only select which apply to the sounds they hear around them. Baker also speculates that his findings may have a larger cultural significance. "One of the things that's intriguing about linguistics is that it's at the crossroads of two very different traditions," he points out. "There's the biological and psychological world that tends to look at human beings as a single species and believes that they're all going to be the same. On the other hand, there's the anthropological side that studies cultures and likes to see differences." These two points of view, says Baker, intersect in linguistics as scholars ask, "Is language fundamentally the same everywhere or is it basically different?" and come to the realization that the answer is both. "I think that's an interesting answer and could be important for how we look at other cultural differences," Baker reflects. "I think what we've learned about languages can give us a new way of understanding multiculturalism — that maybe other cultures look very different, but the underlying rules and principles may not be as different as they look. My guess is, if we know how to define some of the basic elements — ethical systems and so on — maybe we could prove that the rules for social structures across cultures are really very much the same."

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