I"m not sure this is completely related, but every time I think about Chomsky and language and universal grammar, this comes to mind and still leaves me baffled and amazed. This is a short 5 minute video on whistling Turkish. In a village in Turkey, they uphold the tradition of communication by whistling phonemes. It is a direct mapping of Turkish to Whistling Turkish, where every phoneme in Turkish has a whistling equivalent. The difference is it uses pitch changes as phonemes. It blows my mind.
There's a similar tradition of whistled Spanish on the Canary Islands. It was used to talk across mountain valleys and stuff. UNESCO designated it as some kind of cultural heritage, I think.
this article is bad. chomsky and his ilk have always acknowledged the wide variety of linguistic behavior; that's the whole point. universal grammar is the parameters to be set (what sounds have meaning? what word order is used? etc). learning a language is the setting of those parameters.
humans may have linguistic "knowledge" that they're born with, they may not... but this article is beside the point.
In addition, as far as I can see, all of its arguments seem to implicitly target some sort of weird strawman version of Chomskian theories. Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of linguistics would know that no syntacticist expects grammatical universals, if they exist, to be something as simplistic as "words are always ordered like this" or "there are adverbs", or even that there exist positive statements that can be made about all human languages at all (trivially false: put two individuals with a severe speech development disorder in a room and let them establish some basic form of communication; call it a language).
Theorems like EPP and much of 80s control theory (the interplay between recursive structure and what determiner phrases, e.g. pronouns like "he" or demonstratives like "that", refer to), while occasionally being painfully overstretched, do seem to exhibit far better than chance predictive power and had their physics-like moments of conspicuous gaps in predicted taxonomies being neatly filled later. (Check "empty categories" or the rules mentioned under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRO_%28linguistics%29.)
I'm fairly disappointed comparing this to the usual quality of Aeon's articles.
This article is very much on point when it comes to the language debate, you're just taking an oddly hedged position on it.
Chomsky and his ilk have made very strong, very specific claims about language in the past. They have claimed that certain combinations of linguistic parameters are impossible, and that certain features are shared by all languages. They have actively denied the wide variety of linguistic behavior until the evidence piles up enough that they change the topic.
Followers of this brand of linguistics have resisted empirical tests of these claims, and some of them have academically attacked those who disagree. And yet these claims have been chipped away anyway until all that's left is a really vague claim that most humans can communicate using recursion.
Your second paragraph seems at odds with your first. If these parameters exist to be set, that's knowledge. Knowing that word order is a thing that can vary is knowledge. Chomsky says we are born with this knowledge. Some who disagree with him say we aren't born with it, and that we have to learn it from experience.
In the part where you hedge and say "they may not...", you're surprisingly agreeing with this article more than Chomsky. Chomsky would say "Humans absolutely have linguistic knowledge they are born with. Anyone who disagrees is a behaviorist charlatan."
Chomsky's linguistics was indeed a way better model of learning than behaviorism, but that was 60 years ago and we need a better model now.
The article has plenty of flaws, sure, and anyone familiar with linguistics could point some of them out. One of my favorites was the statement that Broca's area was the language center, without any mention of Wernicke's area.
But Chomsky has switched his theoretical perspective so much and so many times that it's hard to tell what his current framework actually is. And increasingly, how relevant it is to contemporary research. It seems like you're advocating the "principles and parameters" approach, but AFAIK Chomsky hasn't advocated that in something like 20 years. P&P is where Chomsky lost me—with the argument that dropping pronouns in English and French amounts to a mental switch that languages flip on or off. Whereas subsequent research immediately showed that pronoun-dropping is just a continuum where English is at one extreme. And lots of Chomsky's arguments, like the poverty of the stimulus, just plain look bad.
Stephen Pinker has completely dominated popular understanding of linguistics with "The Language Instinct", which has influenced how a generation of ordinary people think about language and linguistics. And Chomsky's program dominated both academic and popular understanding before that. But linguistics is a strongly multidisciplinary and multiparadigmatic field, and this is an article aimed at a popular audience that helps make that more plain.
Hmm, given that a few hundred line python script fed with large stream of characters can start producing sentences with correct grammar (however mostly nonsensical), I agree that we, given the complexity of our neural networks, don't need any pre-existing machinery to learn languages.
But in order to do that, the "model" (i.e. the python program itself) needs to be carefully selected. Most python programs - or other programs - won't do this. Indeed, you need to construct the program to pay special attention to particular kinds of statistics, and the choice of those structures would correspond to the hypothetical "universal grammar" - at least, as far as I understand without being overly encumbered by any expertise on the matter ;-).
I've been thinking lately that our brains might have evolved for communication using language. The fact that they can also do philosophy, math, science and engineering is just an unintended (yet fortunate) consequence of having enough capability to handle language.
Learning a foreign language can be as challenging as learning to program or building a software system. It takes a lot of dedication and practice. Involves using a lot of memory and pattern recognition, and all the "intellectual" capacities that are needed to handle a large engineering project.
I only scanned through this very long article to pull out useful info.. I got this:
> [Chomsky] concluded that [children] must be born with a rudimentary body of grammatical knowledge – a ‘Universal Grammar’ – written into the human DNA.
> ... Chomsky is plain wrong
> What is in dispute is the claim that knowledge of language itself – the language software – is something that each human child is born with.
> Our brains really are ‘language-ready’ in the following limited sense: they have the right sort of working memory to process sentence-level syntax, and an unusually large prefrontal cortex that gives us the associative learning capacity to use symbols in the first place.
> And of course, language doesn’t need to be spoken. ..linguistic meaning can be conveyed in multiple ways: in speech, by gestured signs, on the printed page or computer screen. It does not depend upon a particular medium for its expression.
> As it happens, cognitive neuroscience research from the past two decades or so has begun to lift the veil on where language is processed in the brain. The short answer is that it is everywhere.
> Why is it that today, only humans have language, the most complex of animal behaviours?
> [Early humans'] new ecological situation would have led, inexorably, to changes in human behaviour. ... This allows us to picture the emergence of language as a gradual process from many overlapping tendencies.
> We see this instinct [(cooperation)] at work in human infants as they attempt to acquire their mother tongue. Children have far more sophisticated learning capacities than Chomsky foresaw. They are able to deploy sophisticated intention-recognition abilities from a young age, perhaps as early as nine months old, in order to begin to figure out the communicative purposes of the adults around them. And this is, ultimately, an outcome of our co‑operative minds.
I always like to frame this kind of thing using the term "appropriateness."
We can imagine an amoeba having a rudimentary ability to detect whether its surroundings are hostile or not and employ an instinctual response to evade it. It's not much of a leap from there to say humans have a social instinct, and that our ability to evade hostility has become strongly correlated with our ability to identify behaviors that are appropriate in context.
And language is, in an abstract sense, just this: choosing appropriate actions. Maybe they're words. Maybe they're intonations. Or other social norms. Nobody learns 'just' language as a child, they learn a whole way of life. They learn "swearing is wrong," not simply "this is the proper syntax for swearing." And they feel its wrongness when they swear. You can't know what swear words mean if you can't feel that, and you probably won't be able to survive very well as a human if you can't determine what behavior is appropriate or not in your situation.
On his point of DNA not having enough information:
> But recent research in neurobiology suggests that human DNA just doesn’t have anything like the coding power needed to do this
How could the author arrive at this conclusion without knowing what the universal grammar which needs encoding is? And beyond that, what if such a universal grammar is simply an artifact of existing structures accounted for in DNA?
It's not about the brain, it's about the body. Right brain innate connection to ones own body and to the world. We know that there are nouns because the body senses objects. We know there are verbs because the body can make movements. We know there are adjectives because the objects differs. It's a very left brain dominated view that would even contemplate that a language system would evolve free of interaction with the world, only through dna construct some language organ.
And language is probably a product of singing. Checkout "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World". Singing is used to share feelings in larger groups then ordinary grooming permit. Language is a systematization of singing. That is why music evokes feeling response more readily then words in ordinary speech, speech evolved later.
"the chances of two individuals getting the same chance mutation, at exactly the same time, is even less credible. And so, according to the theory of the language instinct, the world’s first language-equipped human presumably had no one to talk to."
This is why I believe that if there are any genetic encodings for language (whether either specific to language alone or non-specific but used also by language, if you get my drift) they must have occurred with twins who were then able to communicate more effectively with each other relative to their peers and so they survived and so did their offspring and their genes spread throughout the gene pool. I know it's a wacky idea but it gets around the rebuttal of "presumably had no one to talk to."
And sure, it's an unlikely event but we're talking hundreds of thousands of years here, thousands of generations, billions of people.
[+] [-] LesZedCB|10 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQf38Ybo1IY
[+] [-] mbrock|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simondedalus|10 years ago|reply
humans may have linguistic "knowledge" that they're born with, they may not... but this article is beside the point.
[+] [-] 4bpp|10 years ago|reply
Theorems like EPP and much of 80s control theory (the interplay between recursive structure and what determiner phrases, e.g. pronouns like "he" or demonstratives like "that", refer to), while occasionally being painfully overstretched, do seem to exhibit far better than chance predictive power and had their physics-like moments of conspicuous gaps in predicted taxonomies being neatly filled later. (Check "empty categories" or the rules mentioned under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRO_%28linguistics%29.)
I'm fairly disappointed comparing this to the usual quality of Aeon's articles.
[+] [-] rspeer|10 years ago|reply
Chomsky and his ilk have made very strong, very specific claims about language in the past. They have claimed that certain combinations of linguistic parameters are impossible, and that certain features are shared by all languages. They have actively denied the wide variety of linguistic behavior until the evidence piles up enough that they change the topic.
Followers of this brand of linguistics have resisted empirical tests of these claims, and some of them have academically attacked those who disagree. And yet these claims have been chipped away anyway until all that's left is a really vague claim that most humans can communicate using recursion.
Your second paragraph seems at odds with your first. If these parameters exist to be set, that's knowledge. Knowing that word order is a thing that can vary is knowledge. Chomsky says we are born with this knowledge. Some who disagree with him say we aren't born with it, and that we have to learn it from experience.
In the part where you hedge and say "they may not...", you're surprisingly agreeing with this article more than Chomsky. Chomsky would say "Humans absolutely have linguistic knowledge they are born with. Anyone who disagrees is a behaviorist charlatan."
Chomsky's linguistics was indeed a way better model of learning than behaviorism, but that was 60 years ago and we need a better model now.
[+] [-] panglott|10 years ago|reply
But Chomsky has switched his theoretical perspective so much and so many times that it's hard to tell what his current framework actually is. And increasingly, how relevant it is to contemporary research. It seems like you're advocating the "principles and parameters" approach, but AFAIK Chomsky hasn't advocated that in something like 20 years. P&P is where Chomsky lost me—with the argument that dropping pronouns in English and French amounts to a mental switch that languages flip on or off. Whereas subsequent research immediately showed that pronoun-dropping is just a continuum where English is at one extreme. And lots of Chomsky's arguments, like the poverty of the stimulus, just plain look bad.
Stephen Pinker has completely dominated popular understanding of linguistics with "The Language Instinct", which has influenced how a generation of ordinary people think about language and linguistics. And Chomsky's program dominated both academic and popular understanding before that. But linguistics is a strongly multidisciplinary and multiparadigmatic field, and this is an article aimed at a popular audience that helps make that more plain.
[+] [-] oxplot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emn13|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hasenj|10 years ago|reply
Learning a foreign language can be as challenging as learning to program or building a software system. It takes a lot of dedication and practice. Involves using a lot of memory and pattern recognition, and all the "intellectual" capacities that are needed to handle a large engineering project.
[+] [-] mitchtbaum|10 years ago|reply
> [Chomsky] concluded that [children] must be born with a rudimentary body of grammatical knowledge – a ‘Universal Grammar’ – written into the human DNA.
> ... Chomsky is plain wrong
> What is in dispute is the claim that knowledge of language itself – the language software – is something that each human child is born with.
> Our brains really are ‘language-ready’ in the following limited sense: they have the right sort of working memory to process sentence-level syntax, and an unusually large prefrontal cortex that gives us the associative learning capacity to use symbols in the first place.
> And of course, language doesn’t need to be spoken. ..linguistic meaning can be conveyed in multiple ways: in speech, by gestured signs, on the printed page or computer screen. It does not depend upon a particular medium for its expression.
> As it happens, cognitive neuroscience research from the past two decades or so has begun to lift the veil on where language is processed in the brain. The short answer is that it is everywhere.
> Why is it that today, only humans have language, the most complex of animal behaviours?
> [Early humans'] new ecological situation would have led, inexorably, to changes in human behaviour. ... This allows us to picture the emergence of language as a gradual process from many overlapping tendencies.
> We see this instinct [(cooperation)] at work in human infants as they attempt to acquire their mother tongue. Children have far more sophisticated learning capacities than Chomsky foresaw. They are able to deploy sophisticated intention-recognition abilities from a young age, perhaps as early as nine months old, in order to begin to figure out the communicative purposes of the adults around them. And this is, ultimately, an outcome of our co‑operative minds.
[+] [-] Retra|10 years ago|reply
We can imagine an amoeba having a rudimentary ability to detect whether its surroundings are hostile or not and employ an instinctual response to evade it. It's not much of a leap from there to say humans have a social instinct, and that our ability to evade hostility has become strongly correlated with our ability to identify behaviors that are appropriate in context.
And language is, in an abstract sense, just this: choosing appropriate actions. Maybe they're words. Maybe they're intonations. Or other social norms. Nobody learns 'just' language as a child, they learn a whole way of life. They learn "swearing is wrong," not simply "this is the proper syntax for swearing." And they feel its wrongness when they swear. You can't know what swear words mean if you can't feel that, and you probably won't be able to survive very well as a human if you can't determine what behavior is appropriate or not in your situation.
[+] [-] chillacy|10 years ago|reply
> But recent research in neurobiology suggests that human DNA just doesn’t have anything like the coding power needed to do this
How could the author arrive at this conclusion without knowing what the universal grammar which needs encoding is? And beyond that, what if such a universal grammar is simply an artifact of existing structures accounted for in DNA?
[+] [-] GarvielLoken|10 years ago|reply
And language is probably a product of singing. Checkout "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World". Singing is used to share feelings in larger groups then ordinary grooming permit. Language is a systematization of singing. That is why music evokes feeling response more readily then words in ordinary speech, speech evolved later.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] akkartik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] igravious|10 years ago|reply
This is why I believe that if there are any genetic encodings for language (whether either specific to language alone or non-specific but used also by language, if you get my drift) they must have occurred with twins who were then able to communicate more effectively with each other relative to their peers and so they survived and so did their offspring and their genes spread throughout the gene pool. I know it's a wacky idea but it gets around the rebuttal of "presumably had no one to talk to."
And sure, it's an unlikely event but we're talking hundreds of thousands of years here, thousands of generations, billions of people.
[+] [-] Xophmeister|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wodenokoto|10 years ago|reply