How children pick up a language: new comment (Humans)

by David Turell , Monday, July 17, 2017, 19:47 (2684 days ago) @ David Turell

Linguistics is a poor theoretical science:

https://aeon.co/essays/is-the-study-of-language-a-science?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&am...

"In Wolfe’s breathless re-telling, the dominant scientific theory is Noam Chomsky’s concept of a ‘universal grammar’ – the idea that all languages share a deep underlying structure that’s almost certainly baked into our biology by evolution. The crucial hypothesis is that its core, essential feature is recursion, the capacity to embed phrases within phrases ad infinitum, and so express complex relations between ideas (such as ‘Tom says that Dan claims that Noam believes that…’). And the challenging fact is the discovery of an Amazonian language, Pirahã, that does not have recursion. The scientific debate plays out as a classic David-and-Goliath story, with Chomsky as a famous, ivory-tower intellectual whose grand armchair proclamations are challenged by a rugged, lowly field linguist and former Christian missionary named Daniel Everett.

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"Linguistics therefore requires you to look beyond what you think you know, and start looking instead at what you don’t know that you know. This implicit knowledge has been the object of study in linguistics since the 1950s. Back then, Chomsky revolutionised the field when he observed that grammar is a generative system. That is, a language is not a big set of all the words and sentences people say in that language; rather, it’s a mental system of rules for generating acceptable sentences. We have the ability to create sentences we’ve never heard that conform to norms we’ve never explicitly learned. From the limited, finite exposure we get while learning our native language, we somehow acquire an unlimited, infinitely productive system of rules.

"Trying to pinpoint those rules depends on a rather counterintuitive practice: not collecting examples of what people actually say, but carefully crafting sentences that no one would ever say.

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"Determining the nature of those structures has been the project of linguistics for decades now. The linguist forms a hypothesis about the configuration of words (Mary [believed [the rumour [that Bill was eating spaghetti.]]]); formulates a rule referring to that structure, which is violated by the unacceptable sentence (you can’t move the object of a verb out to the what position if it has to cross over a noun-phrase level – ‘the rumour’ – to get there) and tests the hypotheses by coming up with more good and bad sentences.

"This is an incredibly counterintuitive way to think about language, which after all is a thing we intuitively know how to use. But it’s still science, an effort to discover the nature of something by forming hypotheses and testing them against evidence. Sentence 3 is evidence that the hypothesis mentioned above it – about the distance of what from the place it traces to – is incorrect. It’s just that the evidence here is not language as spoken ‘out there’ in the world, but an idealised set of consciously contrived sentences.

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"However, for Chomskyans there is a standing commitment to this idea. Universal grammar is not a hypothesis to be tested, but a foundational assumption. Plenty of people take issue with that assumption, but all types of linguists generally agree that there are indeed constraints on what a human language can be, that languages don’t do absolutely anything. They differ on where those restrictions come from.

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"The phrase ‘universal grammar’ gives the impression that it’s going to be a list of features common to all languages, statements such as ‘all languages have nouns’ or ‘all languages mark verbs for tense’. But there are very few features shared by all known languages, possibly none. The word ‘universal’ is misleading here too. It seems like it should mean ‘found in all languages’ but in this case it means something like ‘found in all humans’ (because otherwise they would not be able to learn language as they do.)

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"The years-long immersion in Pirahã culture and the struggle to understand it had a profound personal effect on Everett. His encounter with their concept of truth made him rethink his belief in God and eventually become an atheist. His renunciation of universal grammar involved a similar disillusionment, since he had worked within the framework for the first 25 years of his career. Yet Everett’s study of the Pirahã falsifies neither Christianity nor universal grammar, since they are not designed for falsification in the first place. They are both a way to try to get a handle on reality. The first asks that you take a set of assumptions on faith because they are the truth. The second provides a set of assumptions for generating a line of enquiry that might at some point lead to the truth.

"I’m not sure whether you can call yourself a Christian if you reject the foundational tenets of Christianity – but you can certainly reject the assumptions of universal grammar and still call yourself a linguist. In fact, a drive to debunk Chomsky’s assumptions has led to a flourishing of empirical work in the field. Even as a foil, villain or edifice to be crumbled, the theory of universal grammar offers a framework for discovery, a place to aim the magnifying glass, chisel or wrecking ball, as the case may be."

Comment: The battle goes on.