Human evolution; Egnor on Chomsky (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, August 06, 2020, 18:38 (1568 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: QUOTE: “Even young children inherently know and use grammar rules. They construct and understand sentences of such consistency, intricacy, and complexity that it is clear that they could not have acquired this knowledge merely through incidental daily experience with language.”

We have had this discussion before, and the above typifies assumptions which in my personal experience as a parent, a grandparent, and a longtime lecturer on English grammar, have no basis in fact. Firstly, how young is “young”? In my experience, children start out with individual words, and gradually they learn to string them together. It is NOT clear that this knowledge is acquired through anything other than daily experience with language. An English/French/German child will copy structures used by its English/French/German parents and other acquaintances. These national structures often have totally different "rules", and how else could the child possibly learn those of its own language without being exposed to them? So NON-universal is grammar that once the child has mastered its own native grammar, it will become increasingly difficult to learn foreign equivalents. (That is why one should start teaching foreign languages as early as possible, to avoid “interference”.)

QUOTE: "There is no behavioral explanation for the acquisition of grammar. Kids don’t start out with completely random jumbles of words and gradually, by a system of rewards, learn subject and verb predicates. Even very young children come fully equipped with an instinctive knowledge of grammar that is common to all languages—a “language” organ—as Chomsky called it. They learn the meaning of words with use but they instinctively know grammar from birth. (David’s bold)

Has anyone managed to find out which grammatical structures a newborn baby is able to use? In my experience, as soon as kids can formulate different sounds, they do start out with a jumble of words (usually nouns), grammatical structures come later, and all kinds of grammatical “mistakes” can creep in and will in fact remain if the child’s parents and circle of acquaintances make the same mistakes. This is because young children learn by COPYING. They do not pop out of the womb and say to Mummy and Daddy, “You should say ‘I don’t understand’, not ‘me no understand’.” In fact I truly believe that when they pop out of the womb, they don’t say anything except WAAAAAH! because they haven’t yet LEARNED to say anything else, whether nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, articles, or intricate syntactical combinations of any or all of these.

QUOTE: “This is not to say that non-human animals do not link meanings to sounds—they certainly do—but animals do not structure their sounds and gestures syntactically. Animals have no grammar, and grammar is the hallmark of language.”

If you define language as human language, then no one can possible disagree that animal language is not human language. Initially, all language consisted of sounds, gestures, chemical exchanges. Human language became largely based on sounds. We know that animals also communicate by sound, and zoologists have had no difficulty distinguishing the different meanings of different sounds. But for the most part, our fellow animals have a limited range of sounds, and their ways of life only require a limited range of meanings. Humans developed a vast range of activities which progressively required a wider and wider variety of sounds to convey a wider and wider variety of meanings. (I would argue that the requirements resulted in anatomical changes, but the development of the mechanics is a different subject.) My point is that human language has developed from animal language, mainly sound, and that grammar is only an extension of the need for ever more complex forms of expression as required by ever more complex forms of behaviour and an ever widening range of observation, experience, discovery etc. encompassing past, present and future, concrete and abstract, known and unknown. I strongly doubt that our earliest ancestors were born with a knowledge of grammar, because I strongly doubt whether grammar even existed. I suggest that it has evolved in response to new requirements, and it evolved in different ways as sapiens spread all over the planet in different groups, many with similar requirements but finding different sounds and ultimately different structures to meet those requirements. Language is one feature of the evolutionary process from the simple to the complex. What is the hallmark of human language? I’d say its almost infinite range of expression (initially confined mainly to sounds), to which grammar is an integral but probably late addition.

I appreciate your lengthy input as a parent, writer, translator, multiple linguist, etc. Chomsky is widely accepted by most linguists, so you are an exception. I have no knowledge here accept the knowledge of the recursion argument which is perhaps partially settled.