How children pick up a language: Everett's view (Humans)

by David Turell , Tuesday, January 10, 2017, 14:49 (2875 days ago) @ dhw

This is the linguist who feels Chomsky is wrong in this essay:

https://aeon.co/essays/why-language-is-not-everything-that-noam-chomsky-said-it-is?utm_...

"In 2005, I published a paper in the journal Current Anthropology, arguing that Pirahã – an Amazonian language unrelated to any living language – lacked several kinds of words and grammatical constructions that many researchers would have expected to find in all languages. I made it clear that this absence was not due to any inherent cognitive limitation on the part of its speakers, but due to cultural values, one in particular that I termed the ‘immediacy of experience principle’.

***

"my actual conclusion in that paper was not primarily about recursion, but about the connection between culture and grammar. In fact, the word ‘recursion’ hardly appears in that paper. I addressed the lack of quantifier words, such as ‘all’, ‘each’, and ‘every’; the lack of colour words; the lack of numbers; the lack of creation myths; the lack of religion; the fact that the people have remained monolingual after centuries of contact; that the Pirahãs possessed the simplest kinship ever documented; and so on. What I concluded was almost innocuous:

"For advocates of universal grammar the arguments here present a challenge – defending an autonomous linguistic module that can be affected in many of its core components by the culture in which it ‘grows’. If the form or absence of things such as recursion, sound structure, word structure, quantification, numerals, number, and so on is tightly constrained by a specific culture, as I have argued, then the case for an autonomous, biologically determined module of language is seriously weakened.

***

"If I am correct, then I have shown that the sentential grammars of human languages don’t need to be constructed recursively. People might all think recursively but lack recursion in their grammars. What I have shown is that for the very reason that the Pirahãs can think recursively, then if their language lacks recursion, recursion is not fundamental to human language but is rather a component of human cognition more generally. To claim otherwise, again, is to claim that all languages of the world can lack recursion but recursion is still alone the narrow faculty of language. And that is empirically vacuous gibberish. If there is anything innate and specific to the human capacity for language, the Pirahã data shows that recursion is not part of it."

***

"Recursion is not the basis of human language. One language shows that. Language does not seem to be innate. There seems to be no narrow faculty of language nor any universal grammar. Language is ancient and emerges from general human intelligence, the need to build communities and cultures."

Comment: A very long essay, which deserves reading, but Everett makes reasonable points that our giant brain has enough capacity to create language without an underlying universal grammar.