Human evolution; Chomsky Everett language fight (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, April 18, 2020, 20:29 (1678 days ago) @ David Turell

Everett's finding of no recursion in the Piraha language set the battle which still rages. I've read Wolfe's book critical of Chomsky, which allows me to critically present this essay:

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

"While that debate rages, however, its focal point has come to be how much, if any, of human grammar is innate.

"That is where my work comes in. 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’.

***

"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. (my bold)

***

"Although Chomsky refers to ‘language’ in his writings, he means exclusively a recursive grammatical system. Thus, his claim that ‘language’ derives from a narrow faculty of language that is populated only by recursion is a circular claim, because he is simply telling us how he has defined language for years. If there were a language that chose not to use recursion, it would at the very least be curious and at most would mean that Chomsky’s entire conception of language/grammar is wrong.

***

"Recursion is common in English and many other languages. For example, put the noun ‘truck’ and the noun ‘driver’ inside a single noun, and you get ‘truck-driver’. Put a sentence inside another sentence and you get ‘John said that he did not do it,’ where ‘he did not do it’ is a sentence inside the larger sentence,

***

"Like anyone, I could be wrong. Pirahã might one day be proven to have recursion. But no one has done anything remotely close to that yet, and none have successfully rebutted my 2005 analysis. There was a critical discussion of my work in the journal Language, as I mention directly, where I and my critics went back and forth, but it is fair to say that neither side was more convinced after the exchange than before. Some of the reviews and discussions of Wolfe’s book have even remarked that the debate is irrelevant. That is also wrong. The debate is crucial to our understanding of human language and evolution, and so far the evidence supports my view, not Chomsky’s.

***

"Pirahãs who speak Pirahã natively and are culturally Pirahãs speak very little Portuguese, if any. And, according to Sakel’s work, when they do speak it is non-recursive Portuguese. This is a (fascinating) fact about the contact between Pirahã and Portuguese cultures and the basic values of the Pirahãs. It is not a question of intelligence. They are not stupid or backwards or genetically isolated weirdos. It is the connection between their culture and grammar that brings this about.

***

"The Chomskyan view is that Pirahã is not only not a counterexample, but an (irrelevant) exception. The new Chomskyan view that ‘recursion is just a state of mind’ won’t make Pirahã irrelevant. Thinking recursively is not the same as having a recursive grammar.

***

"Recursion is not the biological basis for language. It is an enhancement of human thought.
(my bold) [This make the best sense to me.]

***

"In short, the question is not whether humans can think recursively. The question is whether this ability is linked specifically to language or instead to human cognitive accomplishments more generally (it could be connected to both, but that is less likely given what we know about the organisation of the brain).

***

"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. (my bold)

***

"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: The last bold settles a tempest in a teapot. Chomsky cannot tolerate being challenged. Our language ability is simply an amazing singular human attribute, in which recursion facilitates thought.