Chomsky and Me Too: Review of Stohl 2023

(https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/chomsky-and-me/)

In this blog post, I review Bev Stohl’s memoir ‘Chomsky and Me’ (2023, OR Books) from my personal point of view, as a graduate student who attended the MIT Department of Linguistics from 1988 to 1993. To complement Stohl’s perspective, I describe some of my own experiences in the department, studying with Chomsky.

Stohl was Chomsky’s administrative assistant at MIT from March 1993 to June 2017. Through his writings, interviews, talks and correspondence, Chomsky developed into a world-wide clearinghouse of political activism. When 9/11 took place, people called him from all over the world asking for interviews to make sense of it all (pg. 50). Countless numbers of people have filed through his office, including frequent film crews, hoping to get advice from him. Over one three-day weekend alone, they received over one thousand e-mail messages (pg. 178). For 24 years, Stohl was the gatekeeper for this vast and chaotic enterprise. Every single person had to go through her to get to Chomsky. Much of the book is about the constant challenges she faced in fulfilling this duty.

Stohl writes in an entertaining and an easy-to-read style. The bottom line is that I really enjoyed this book. I especially recommend it to linguists, who will learn about a side of Chomsky beyond his linguistics persona.

The memoir portrays a human side of Chomsky that would otherwise be impossible to know about. It describes Chomsky as a mild-mannered somewhat absent-minded professor, who loves to spend time with his grandchildren, and to go boating at Cape Code during the summers. Stohl developed a warm caring relationship with Chomsky and Halle, who both went to her mother’s funeral (pg. 208). Within the day-to-day turmoil of Chomsky’s schedule, they maintained a friendly light-hearted banter. The picture painted is of a team consisting of Stohl and Chomsky and a few others working as a cohesive unit. When she retired, Chomsky said of her (pg. 300):

“When you walk into our offices over there [he gestured toward our suite], you will find a warm and welcoming atmosphere. Bev created that.” A short pause followed. “Difficult day-to-day things happened in that office. I know it couldn’t have been easy for her, taking care of two old men. There were some very difficult times, but Bev was there, and she did it all well.”

A significant part of the book concerns events in Stohl’s life outside of the office, before and during her time with Chomsky. These parts of the book help us understand how she came to write the book she did. How did Stohl come to work at MIT? How did she get the job as Chomsky’s assistant? In spite of the intense pressures associated with the position, how did she manage to keep it and thrive for 24 years? What parts of Chomsky’s work resonated with her family background? What parts of the job did she enjoy the most? What experiences in her life led up to her decision to write a memoir? How exactly did she start writing the memoir? What role did her blog play in the process? All of these questions are addressed directly or indirectly in the memoir.

Stohl’s descriptions of Chomsky and the MIT campus are precious to me, jogging old memories. For example, at one point she describes Chomsky’s unique hand gestures (pg. 177):

I hadn’t realized that I held a view on Noam’s personal sign language until I shared it. “I think he is physically moving and organizing his thoughts with his hands. He pushes both hands to the left or the right, palms splayed slightly down, as if to say, ‘Let’s put this thought over here,’ or ‘That refers to this group.’ He may come to center, fingertips of both hands pointing inward toward his chest, then fanning all fingertips forward and out to the sides.” I illustrated each movement as I spoke. “It has always looked to me like his thoughts are in the space in front of him, and he’s illustrating them as he speaks.”

We had graduate students from all over the world, including North America, Africa, Europe, India, China and Japan, and all of them were using Chomsky’s unique hand gestures to some extent. Just by watching somebody speak, you could tell if they were an MIT linguistics student by the way they moved their hands. In retrospect, it was hilarious. We were subconsciously imitating him, even down to his hand gestures.

Stohl also gives a number of harrowing descriptions of Building 20, the long-time home of the MIT Department of Linguistics, before it moved to the Stata Center.

“Building 20 was put up in 1942 as a temporary structure for radiation research during World War II, to be torn down at war’s end. Yet here it stood, or leaned, nearing collapse. Wood shingles had cracked and fallen during our scorching summers and icy winters, and the whitewashed walls had faded to gray. Each time the door to our suite flew open, a knob-sized hole in the wall poured a layer of white powder onto the floor. Asbestos dust, we later learned. This was my new home.”

This building was a hive of linguistic activity during my time there. Maybe because of its dilapidated condition, we seemed to thrive in it. We would enter the building by climbing metal stairs on the outside of the building. Were those stairs the fire escape? The floors were wooden, and I could always hear people approaching from far down the hallway. But the physical condition of the building did not bother me at all.

Given Chomsky’s central role in linguistic theory since the mid-50s, it might be a bit surprising that linguistics plays such a minor role in Stohl’s memoir. The linguists and linguistic issues make at most guest appearances, flashing briefly in and out of the powerful day-to-day flow of political activism. 

Here is a nearly complete list of the linguistic anecdotes in the memoir: There was a brief description of Chomsky’s interview with Ann Makepeace who filmed a documentary about the revival of the Wampanoag language (pg. 47). Neurolinguistics makes an appearance during a trip to Italy (pg. 181): “Neurolinguists were studying the brain–language connection by hooking up electrodes to the exposed brains of people before surgery, noting which parts of the brain lit up when answering questions. The patients were conscious, with exposed brains.” Gene Searchinger’s interview with Chomsky (pg. 43) for his series ‘The Human Language’ was mentioned briefly. Somewhat more extensive coverage was given of the behind-the-scenes activity of Michel Gondry’s wonderful film about Chomsky ‘Is the man who is tall happy?’ (pg. 280).

I did not walk away from Stoh’s memoir with any additional insight into this period of history (1993-2017) in the field of syntax, the field that Chomsky is closely associated with in linguistics. Nor did Chomsky’s interactions with other linguists (letters, notes, calls, e-mail messages, meetings, debates, public lectures, class lectures, phone conversations, interviews, manuscripts) play a significant role in the memoir. Luigi Rizzi and Adriana Belletti make a cameo appearance, joining Chomsky at an opera in Pavia, Italy (pg. 180). A few other syntacticians (Jim Huang, Andrea Moro) make brief cameo appearances as well. The word ‘syntax’ appears in the memoir only twice, and the word ‘minimalist’ only once. The terminology of syntactic theory does not appear at all. 

Since Stohl is not a linguist, there is no way that she could have understood those themes and reported on them accurately. She herself admits her lack of knowledge about linguistics (pg. 31): 

“From my newbie vantage point, the linguistics side of things seemed innocuous, but also murky. I could define phonology and syntax, but knew little more about linguistics. Standing outside Noam’s office, I’d overheard him asking an advisee, ‘Can you say in Icelandic: There have many men baked cakes?’ These peculiar discussions made me wonder what it was linguists did. Years later, I still wasn’t sure.”

Another reason for the lack of coverage of linguistics may be the way Chomsky worked in the two worlds: political activism versus linguistics. Although he would meet regularly with the linguistics and philosophy students in the department, the vast majority of the external visitors to the department must have been activists, not linguists. These were the celebrities and the people arriving with film crews. They would be the people who would catch Stohl’s attention and often give her problems in the office (moving furniture around, running over time, etc.).

On a related note, Stohl (pg. 289) gives a career tabulation of Chomsky’s writings of over 80 political books and over 30 linguistics books. That ratio might also be taken as an approximation for the amount of time, effort and thought Chomsky spent on the two disciplines during his entire career (73% political activism, 27% linguistics and philosophy). And that percentage seems to have tilted even more in favor of activism over time (see Stohl 2015).

Now, about my relationship with Chomsky.

I began my undergraduate education at the University of Minnesota in 1981, and transferred to MIT midway through my sophomore year. Chomsky’s work was prominent at MIT then, often being discussed in my courses. In the summer after my sophomore year, I read ‘Reflections on Language’ (1975, Pantheon Books). I know I read it, because my copy of the book still has copious margin notes and underlining. My notes make reference to Piaget and Artificial Intelligence, showing what was on my mind at that time. I was struggling to understand what Chomsky was saying.

Then in the summer after my junior year, I read through Andrew Radford’s Transformational Syntax (1981, Cambridge University Press) in its entirety and worked through the all exercises with a friend. The book was a very clearly written presentation of Chomsky’s theory of syntax. I remember staring in awe at the text of the book. The combination of formal reasoning with psychological themes resonated very deeply with me. I was immediately hooked.

I returned to MIT as a graduate student in the Department of linguistics, where I studied from Fall 1988 to Spring 1993. Stohl and I overlapped for a few months, although to be honest I do not remember her from that time. Rather, I remember that Chomsky’s administrative assistant was Jamie Young. Stohl took over from Young in 1993, after interviews involving Halle and Young, but not including Chomsky (pg. 29).

At the beginning of each semester, I walked into Chomsky’s office, and arranged my meetings with Young for the semester. All the grads would do this, so his schedule quickly filled up. I also attended his Fall and Spring seminars. 

Chomsky taught two courses per year. In the Fall he taught 24.958 ‘Linguistic Structure’ always scheduled on Thursday afternoons from 2:00 to 4:00. In the Spring he taught 24.957 ‘Introduction to Linguistic Theory at an Advanced Level’. This was a philosophical course examining the foundations of syntactic theory. They were listed as follows in the 1986-1987 MIT Course Catalogue.

24.957 Introduction to Linguistic Theory at an Advanced Level (A)

Prereq.: Permission of Instructor

G(2)

3-0-9

Discussion of conceptual and methodological issues: goals of linguistic theory and its place in the study of thought and behavior; descriptive and explanatory theories; the nature, use and acquisition of language compared with other cognitive systems; relations of form, meaning and language use. Examinations of theories of transformational generative grammar as they have evolved and are now being pursued: theory of base, transformations, semantic interpretation of formal structures, logical form and conditions on the form and functioning of rules.

N. A. Chomsky

24.958 Linguistic Structure (A)

Prereq.: 24.952 or 24.957

G(1)

3-0-9

Current work on topics in syntax and semantics. 

Permission of instructor required.

N. A. Chomsky

Chomsky was not at MIT in the Fall of 1988 presumably because he had just had back surgery that summer (see Chomsky and Kelman 2021: 113). So, Richard Larson took over his seminar that semester, and taught the beginnings of his VP-shell theory. Larson’s theories fed directly into Ken Hale and Jay Keyser’s work on argument structure, and all this work formed a critical part of Chomsky 1995 (see below).

From my time in Togo in the Peace Corps (1985-1987), I had become obsessed by serial verb constructions, and I wanted to start to develop my thinking about them. So, for my paper for the Spring 1989 seminar, I wrote about Mark Baker’s paper on serial verb constructions (1989. Object Sharing and Projection in Serial Verb Constructions, Linguistic Inquiry 20). While Baker’s paper ingeniously captured the object sharing property of serial verbs, it did so at the expense of a drastic weaking of X’-Theory (so that verbal projections could have two heads). There was a serious restrictiveness issue lurking in Baker’s account: allowing projections to have exactly one head drastically limited the total number of syntactic structures available to a language learner. In syntactic theory, there is an ever-present tension between theoretical restrictiveness and empirical coverage.

In retrospect, I should have focused on the important restrictiveness issue, but instead I detailed my thoughts on a number of small technical issues in Baker’s paper. I clearly remember Chomsky’s main comment at the very top of my paper was “Pretty terse + hard to follow”. This is an exact quote, since I still have a scan of the paper today. Some other comments on the paper were: “I don’t follow the argument.”, “Sounds plausible, but you haven’t really given an argument.”, “I don’t see why this follows.”, “There is something wrong with the reasoning here.”, “I don’t see this.”, “Not a very strong argument.” He had obviously read the paper very carefully, and he did not find it convincing. I was completely devastated. This was one of my first intellectual interchanges with Chomsky, and I had apparently failed. After spending days thinking of detailed responses to all of his remarks and jotting them down on the paper under his remarks, I realized he was exactly right in all of his comments. The paper was indeed terse and hard to follow. I needed to raise my game to the next higher level. That was a learning experience for me, and I appreciate his honesty in replying to my paper.

As for his Fall syntax seminar, it was invariably packed with students and faculty both from MIT and surrounding schools (e.g., Harvard, UMASS, UCONN, and many others). Chomsky always focused on the structure of syntactic theory, not just solving empirical problems, but laying out what the theory should look like. He freely took questions in class, so the atmosphere was electric. People were raising their hands bringing up counter-examples or noting theoretical consequences. He had developed a system whereby he would lecture for two hours, then for the third hour only students in the class could attend a Q and A period. As I recall, there were never any handouts, nor was there a syllabus. He just lectured from his notes, and wrote extensively on the blackboard. The feeling I got was that he was developing most of the material as the semester went on, which I found exciting. From that time on, I always associate the oncoming chill of the Fall air with the intellectual excitement I got attending Chomsky’s Fall lectures.

His seminal paper ‘Some Notes on Economy of Derivation and Representation’ (first published in MITWPL in 1989) had already started circulating as a draft in 1988, and was creating a buzz amongst the students. In that paper, he introduced the notion of economy of derivation and used it to reanalyze parts of Jean-Yves Pollock’s famous paper on verb movement in French and English (1989. Verb Movement, Universal Grammar, and the Structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20, 365-424). The notion of economy was to become a central component of the minimalist program. 

The years of my graduate education (1988 to 1993) correspond roughly with the beginning of minimalist syntax, which I would date from the publication of Chomsky 1989 (‘Some Notes’, MITWPL 10) to the publication of Chomsky 1995 (‘The Minimalist Program’, MIT Press). I call this period ‘early minimalism’. It was fascinating to see how the ideas developed over those years. The minimalist program did not just appear overnight, but it took years of pondering the data and hammering away at the theory before taking form.

All of the extremely smart graduate students focused their attention on helping him to work out his new theory. We were engaged in a common project, having long and intense discussions amongst ourselves to try to understand it. Since the evolving minimalist program involved quite a few conceptual shifts from past versions of generative syntax (e.g., Merge, the Copy Theory of Movement, Bare Phrase Structure, eliminating D-Structure and S-Structure, eliminating government, economy conditions on derivations and representations, the notion of convergence), it was an intellectually exhilarating time period. All the old analyses had to be rejected or completely revised. It felt like the doors had been opened wide, leading to vast empirical and theoretical vistas. It was a time of great opportunity for the students, who were writing insightful papers and theses exploring the framework. Chomsky’s preliminary steps in minimalist syntax were published in ‘The Minimalist Program’ (MIT Press, 1995).

I suspect that the development of minimalism was one of the reasons that I found a prestigious job immediately after graduate school (Cornell University, 1993). People in other universities wanted to know what was going on, and when I arrived, they wanted me to teach seminars explaining the new developments. I was the best person to help them, because I had just spent years deeply immersed in these new ideas at MIT. Arriving at Cornell, I also interacted with the philosophers there, who were very knowledgeable about linguistic theory and enthusiastic about minimalism. In the years after graduation, I was invited all over the world to talk about minimalist syntax, including China, France, Germany, Holland, Japan, Norway, South Africa and Spain. Apparently, a very small bit of Chomsky’s magic had rubbed off on me.

The excitement in the air in the late 1980s and early 1990s paralleled the excitement in the air at the time that Government and Binding (Principles and Parameters) was being developed in the fall of 1979, around ten years earlier. According to David Pesetsky (quote from Macfarquhar 2003, The New Yorker):

 “It felt like a revolution,” he says. “It was very exciting. Suddenly there were questions that you could ask that hadn’t been asked before, and real answers to questions that people had been asking before. And to be a student here at the time was an incredible privilege. In a sense, it was a cheat. Because it was just very, very easy to say something interesting that no one had ever said before. You could be a celebrity!”

Curiously, when minimalism rolled around, Pesetsky was critical of it. He was not at all onboard. I remember Pesetsky making critical comments during his own seminars and also once right after Chomsky’s lecture. Other students from my cohort experienced similar staunch opposition to minimalism. Perhaps Pesetsky was just being conservative theoretically, which is not a bad thing. After all, theoretical innovations should be explored and tested empirically before they are adopted. But it must have been difficult to be a syntax faculty member at MIT and to be faced with the intellectual tidal wave of Chomsky’s ideas.

It is important to highlight Howard Lasnik’s role in the development of early minimalism. Lasnik was one of Chomsky’s closest collaborators in syntax around then, co-authoring chapter 1 of Chomsky 1995. Lasnik always attended Chomsky’s Thursday lecture. In the hours leading up to the lecture he was available in Building 20 for meetings with students. I tried to meet with him as much as possible. During these meetings, we would talk about my own work, but we would also talk about what Chomsky was developing in his seminar. He was a key component in my syntax education. His students at the University of Connecticut consistently produced some of the most important theses on minimalist syntax.

My appointments with Chomsky were intense. I recall jokingly telling a classmate that meetings with him resembled a scene in Star Trek where Captain Kirk and Spock are fighting (with the suspenseful background orchestra music), and clearly Chomsky was Spock. It is not that Chomsky was aggressive in any way, he was just very focused as a person. He did try to end each appointment with a positive word or two, saying something like “Good work!”. See also Stohl’s memoir (chapter 4, pg. 40) for a description of a student meeting.

For Chomsky the issue was always how your work fit into syntactic theory, in this case minimalism. Other people had very different styles. With Howard Lasnik, the focus was on the logic of the argument, which is why years later his students put together a volume of papers called ‘Step by Step’ (2000, MIT Press). David Pesetsky would pepper you with questions about alternative possible analyses, dubbed by the students in my cohort the ‘Pesky Set’ (that set of pesky alternative analyses that you need to consider before finding the best analysis). Ken Hale had a vast knowledge of cross-linguistic data at his fingertips, not just of Indo-European languages, but also of Native American and Australian languages too. He would often help you make important connections to related phenomena in other languages. To be able to train with these four excellent syntacticians was an incredible privilege. 

For my dissertation (Topics in Ewe Syntax 1993), Chomsky was a member of my committee, along with Ken Hale (Chair) and David Pesetsky. Since Ken Hale was a high caliber field linguist, I thought he would be a more appropriate choice as Chair. But I met just as frequently with Chomsky. He was especially interested in what I had to say about successive cyclic movement (movement broken down into smaller steps) and economy of derivation. He played an important role in advising me on my first refereed journal publication (1994. Economy of Derivation and the Generalized Proper Binding Condition. Linguistic Inquiry 25.1, 45-61). Although this paper was published in 1994, I had written it under Chomsky’s supervision while at MIT in 1993. I believe this paper was one of the very first papers to show how economy conditions apply to syntactic derivations, helping to explain a complicated empirical phenomenon.

In the years after graduation in 1993, I have kept in regular contact with Chomsky in various ways. 

For my first study leave from Cornell, I flew from Ithaca every Thursday to his syntax seminar. I would wake up at 5:00am in the morning to catch my flight, arrive in Logan airport, take a taxi into Cambridge and spend the day in meetings at Au Bon Pain in Kendall Square with MIT students and colleagues. These were great meetings, having a coffee and croissant, and debating syntactic theory in the warmth of a hidden corner of a café. After Chomsky’s lecture, I would take the plane back from Logan and arrive late at night in Ithaca, opening the door of the house when the kids were already fast asleep, syntax ideas coursing through my brain.

In 2009, a few years after Carol Chomsky passed away, I gave a talk on my paper ‘A Formalization of Minimalist Syntax’ (2016, Syntax) at the MIT Syntax-Semantics Reading Group. I was happy to see many of my old teachers there, including Wayne O’Neil and David Pesetsky. Chomsky did not come to the talk, but I had made an appointment with him afterwards. This was also the first time that I remember meeting Stohl, since she was there to let us into his office in the Stata Center.

Because my wife had never met him, I decided to take her along to introduce her. My wife is a nurse, so Chomsky and her spent about half of my meeting talking about medical care and the importance of nurses. He emphasized the wonderful care that Carol had received from nurses during her illness. He seemed happy to pass the time talking to my wife about health care in America. Finally, as calmly as I could manage, I asked my wife if I could please discuss my syntax paper, which was the sole reason for my visit to Cambridge that day. We had a productive conversation where he once again expressed his long-standing skepticism about formalization in syntactic theory. I quizzed him on various proposals in the paper. When Stohl appeared in the doorway, we got up to go. As usual, my appointment with Chomsky had given me lots to think about. 

Since graduation, I have kept in contact with Chomsky on a regular basis through e-mail. I write messages to him to discuss various topics. If I hear he has a new paper out, I write to him to get a copy. I always send him papers of mine that I think he will be interested in. Since 1993, I have exchanged hundreds of e-mail messages with him. And he has never once has failed to respond. These discussions could be quite intense lasting several weeks.  From what I know about other syntax colleagues, they too have had very productive professional relationships with Chomsky after graduating, involving intense and lengthy e-mail discussions about syntactic theory. In this, we are beneficiaries of Chomksy’s willingness to engage with people, one of the important running themes of the memoir.

Mostly recently, I did two closely related interviews with him for my blog, one in 2021 about formal semantics, and one in 2022 about language and thought:

‘A Conversation with Noam Chomsky about Formal Semantics’

(https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2021/06/a-conversation-with-noam-chomsky-about.html)

‘A Conversation with Noam Chomsky about Language and Thought’

(https://ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2022/03/a-conversation-with-noam-chomsky-about.html)

These interviews were just natural extensions of e-mail correspondence that we were already having. After a few dozen e-mail messages, I would ask Chomsky: “Can I post this discussion on my blog?”, and he agreed, with no restrictions at all. I did let him read the interviews to make corrections, but except for typos he did not change anything.

As is clear from this blog post, Chomsky’s influence on my intellectual development has been profound. In the 1950s, he created generative grammar, the framework which captivated me as an undergraduate, and led me to graduate school in linguistics. Then, in early 1990s he developed the minimalist program, which I have been working on ever since. Because of his importance in my life, I was quite eager to read Stohl’s memoir. Although the memoir did not touch on the development of syntactic theory, and says little about linguistics more generally, I was richly rewarded with detailed descriptions of Chomsky’s day-to-day work in the office, and a much better understanding of Chomsky as a human being.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Akira Watanabe for sending me a scan of his notes on Chomsky’s lectures (1989-1991).

Selected References

Gammie, Duncan. 2022. Bev Stohl – Chomsky’s Assistant. Dunk Tank [Podcast].

(https://dunctank.podbean.com/e/bev-stohl-chomsky-s-assistant/)

Genova, Evelisa. 2023. Confidence and Creativity with Noam Chomsky’s Assistant Bev Stohl. Stories of Life and Love [Podcast].

(https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/evelisa/episodes/Confidence-and-Creativity-with-Noam-Chomskys-Assistant-Bev-Stohl-e1t988f)

Hawkins, John. 2023. Interview with Ben Boisseau Stohl: Chomsky and Me. OpEdNews.com.

(https://www.opednews.com/articles/Interview-with-Bev-Boissea-Critical-Thinking_Interviews_Noam-Chomsky-230322-723.html)

Lydon, Christopher. Beverly Stohl on Noam Chomsky’s Soul. Sound Cloud.

(https://soundcloud.com/radioopensource/beverly-stohl-on-noam-chomskys-soul)

Stohl, Bev. Linked-In Profile.

(https://www.linkedin.com/in/bev-stohl-01505728/)

Stohl, Bev.Bev Stohl’s Stata Confusion [Blog].

(https://bevstohl.blogspot.com/)

Stohl, Bev. 2015. What It’s Like to Be Noam Chomsky’s Assistant. Chronicle of Higher Education (December 18, 2015)

(https://uat.brightspot.chronicle.com/article/what-its-like-to-be-noam-chomskys-assistant/)

Stohl, Bev. 2020. Mamma’s gonna buy you a mocking bird. Stethoscopes and Pencils.

(https://stethoscopesandpencils.com/2020/11/12/mamas-gonna-buy-you-a-mocking-bird/)