What was the broad question that you most wanted to get an answer to during your time in the program?
What brought me to the program was the simple notion that language belonged in our minds, that it was a complex species-specific trait rooted in our brains. For someone trained as a phylologist (like me), in a tradition were language was conceived as some inmaterial, platonic entity whose fundamental nature was hardly ever reflected upon, the idea that language lived in our minds/brains was a powerful one, even though fom today’s perspective this might seem surprising. Almost by chance I read some of Noam’s early works (Cartesian Linguistics, Reflections on Language, etc.) and it was mainly that notion of language as part of (cognitive) psychology that really ignited my desire to study linguistics (my original goal was literature). That, and the idea that grammars were precise mechanisms whose formal architecture could be studied and implemented formally, explicitelly, generatively. I soon began to fake breitling pester my friends in bars, telling them about this amazing linguist and his ideas, and I started fantasizing that I might one day be a student in the department, which I imagined very differnt from how it was. But this was just a far fetched fantasy. Later on, as I was finishing my bachelor’s degree in Basque Phylology, a concatenation of highly improbable and very lucky events led me into the program. When I landed, there was no specific question I seeked an answer for; what drove me was a general curiosity about the inner workings of language. I wanted to understand its basic features, and how they could give rise to the great variability of specific grammars.
What is the current status of this question? Has it been answered? Did it turn out to be an ill-conceived question? If it’s a meaningful question as yet unanswered, please tell us what you think the path to an answer might be, or what obstacles make it a hard question.
In my view, there has been enormous progress in our understanding of the fundamental aspects of language, and the bits and pieces that continue to complete this puzzle come from many fields, not only linguistics. I think our views (at least mine) regarding the the place language has in our minds have changed. The neurocogitive foundations upon which language rests appear to be less species and domain-specific than was generally thought before, but at the same time grammatical computation of meaningful elements stands out as a human-specific trait. The general question of the nature of language and its basic design is a lively one today, and though I know I am very optimistic in my outlook, I do think there are interdisciplinary bridges a researcher can walk now that did not exist when I was a student. The complexity of the problem is not trivial; there are aspects that in my view ought to receive greater consideration in Linguistics, like the impact of time in the course of linguistic computation, the impact of non-grammatical factors, and the nature and architecture of other neurocognitive functions, which would make communication across disciplines interested in the study of language more fruitful, but in my opinion the central questions about the nature and design of human language are meaningful and very much alive. I think the challenge for contemporary Linguistics is to play a central role in the quest for an answer, not to withdraw from it.