How children pick up a language: denying Chomsky (Humans)

by David Turell , Sunday, August 28, 2016, 00:30 (3008 days ago) @ David Turell

Thomas Wolfe has a new book, The Kingdom of Speech, saying Chomsky is wrong:-http://www.wsj.com/articles/taking-on-chomsky-and-darwin-1472238740-"Speech leaves no traces, so tracing its origin is extraordinarily difficult. To me, it seems plausible that the question was “abandoned” because scientists are loath to hurl themselves at questions that may not be answerable in their lifetimes.-***-"In any case, as Mr. Wolfe recounts, the impasse was finally broken by the arrival of Noam Chomsky, a combative linguist and philosopher hired by MIT about a nanosecond after he finished his doctoral dissertation. In “Syntactic Structures” (1957), Mr. Chomsky argued that babies learn to speak with so little instruction that the underpinnings of language must be present from birth in a built-in “language organ” in the brain, a biological construction given to us by evolution. Because all humans have the same language organ, its capacities must shape all languages. These shared properties are a “universal grammar.”-***- "by the 1990s, the failure of biologists to find an actual language organ in the brain was leading to dissent. Mr. Chomsky also had trouble specifying the precise features of the universal grammar—it had to be broad enough to include every language from Japanese to Urdu yet simple enough to be viewed as a small batch of principles. Recognizing the problems, Mr. Chomsky sought to find the minimal foundation of language. In 2002 he and two Harvard cognitive scientists announced that they had discovered it: recursion.-***-"Take the awkward but understandable sentence “The cat (that the dog ((which the boy called Spot)) chased) ran away.” Slipped inside one thought (“the cat ran away”) are two more thoughts, one about the dog, one about its name. Recursion allows small units to be combined into larger units, with no theoretical stopping point. -***-" Mr. Chomsky et al.'s recursion was criticized at length by two luminaries, Steven Pinker and Ray Jackendoff.-***-"an account by linguist Daniel L. Everett, a former Chomsky disciple, of the Pirahã language, spoken only by the several hundred members of an indigenous group of the same name in the western Amazon. Mr. Everett had gone to the Pirahã as a missionary with his family, lived for years in difficult conditions and emerged as one of the few outsiders fluent in the language. Pirahã, he said, has no recursion—it doesn't embody Mr. Chomsky's universal grammar. More than that, its structure is so obviously tied to Pirahã culture that the language must have been created in its reflection—and not by some universal language organ. Nurture, Mr. Everett was saying, not nature.-***-"'Bango!” Tom Wolfe explains in his conclusion: There is a cardinal distinction between man and animal, a sheerly dividing line as abrupt and immovable as a cliff: namely, speech.” (Aristotle made exactly this argument around 330 B.C. in his “Politics.” But maybe it doesn't count?) To Mr. Wolfe, Mr. Everett's attack on recursion—and on the idea that speech was produced by evolution—was proof our species is special. “Speech, language, was something that existed quite apart from Evolution. It had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Man, man unaided, created language.”-***-"Speech, Mr. Wolfe says triumphantly, gave our species “the power to conquer the entire planet,” “the power to ask questions about his own life,” the power to control other human minds—“a power the Theory of Evolution cannot even begin to account for . . . or abide.” “Speech! To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo's David.”-***-"None believe that today's languages evolved from some unknown ape tongue. Meanwhile, everyone who accepts evolution at all—including, I had thought, Mr. Wolfe—knows that the larynx evolved over time, as did the pharyngeal cavity, motor cortex and the rest of the mechanism of speech. Geneticists have turned up a library of genes involved in language. Zoologists have found that animal sounds are more complex than previously believed.-***-"To all of these people, the arrival of language is not a matter of abrupt on-and-off, like a light switch, but more a subtle accumulation, like a dimmer switch. Co-evolution, as Darwin hand-waved at the beginning."-Comment; Too bad Wolfe and Adler cannot get together and discuss 'different in kind', which is just what speaking ability and language do for Humans. I think Wolfe and Adler would agree. Great article which contains insights into Wallace and Darwin and should be completely read.