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Unit 26: Swift–Hints Towards An Essay on Conversation ...

criticisms which Chomsky made of a corpus-based approach was that it modelled the wrong Notes
aspect of language - performance instead of competence. Spoken or written language as observed
and captured in corpora is always imperfect due to tiredness, laziness, absentmindedness,
carelessness and so on. The object of study of Chomsky’s programme was the knowledge or
competence underlying such performance data. What must the brain be like to account for the
learning and production of language? This critique of empirical data is intimately linked to the
theory which undergirds the whole Chomskian programme: namely, his modern version of
Cartesianism. Chomsky, having stressed the creativity of language production in his overthrow of
behaviourism, averred that no corpus could be a representative sample of the innumerable sentences
of a language: the corpus would always be skewed. Even in the 1960s, a rearguard of linguists
worked unashamedly with computer corpus collections of attested naturally-occurring language
data, i.e., performance data (Kucera & Francis, 1967). This was flagrant empiricism against the
prevalent rationalist tide and so we are right back in the Glubbdubdribrian world of Locke,
Berkeley, and Hobbes pitted against Descartes and Spinoza, all of whose major works sat in
Swift’s study (Lefanu, 1988).
The mainframe and personal computer can be viewed as observation instruments which might
revolutionize the science of linguistics as the telescope and the microscope revolutionized astronomy
and medicine (Stubbs, 1996: 231). Swift’s fascination with astronomical speculations is well-
documented (Nicholson and Mohler, 1968) and is playfully depicted in the Laputans’ fear of
comets (Gulliver Book 3). In the Laputans, he did after all predict, although perhaps fortuitously,
the second moon of Mars more than 150 years before its discovery in 1877.
Two leading corpus linguists, Sinclair and Renouf (1988), point out the relentless efficiency of the
computer when used to observe language:
retrieval systems, unlike human beings, miss nothing if properly instructed - no usage can be
overlooked because it is too ordinary or too familiar ... The human mind, contrary to popular
belief, is not well organized for isolating consciously what is central and typical in the language;
anything unusual is sharply perceived, but the humdrum everyday events are appreciated
subliminally. (Sinclair & Renouf, 1988: 151)
In the final section of this paper, I would like to give the reader a glimpse of what the computer
can tell us about Swift’s language as revealed in the work of Milic (1967).
We have inherited a set of dualisms from our forebears - for instance, mind/body, langue/parole
and competence/performance. A novel attempt to sit on the fence over one of these dichotomies
is provided by Partington (1998: 145) when he suggests that a corpus is neither performance nor
competence but supplants the differentiation between the two concepts. The concept of competence,
the ideal speaker’s knowledge of the language, raises certain philosophical problems because
claims about ‘ideal knowledge’ are not falsifiable by any evidence. The individuality of performance
needs to be transcended:
information about particular communicative events by itself is of limited, we might even say
purely anecdotal value. By and large, we are not methodologically justified in interpreting the
significance of a particular linguistic event unless we can compare it with other similar events. The
corpus can provide “background information” against which particular events can be seen.
(Partington, 1998: 146)
Swift showed awareness of this force towards dichotomization when he described the language
professors at the Academy of Lagado (Gulliver Book III) who sought to abolish words and replace
them with things. This passage and others (for instance, the Houyhnhnms’ having no need to
write) have led some critics to impute grammaphobia or a deep distrust of the written word to
Swift (Castle, 1999: 239). Edward Said paints a more complex picture when he suggests rather that

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