Human evolution; Chomsky Everett language fight (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, September 10, 2020, 18:22 (1318 days ago) @ David Turell

A different take from another linguist:

http://nautil.us/issue/89/the-dark-side/-talking-is-throwing-fictional-worlds-at-one-an...

"Adger’s knowledge of human languages runs deep. For decades he has ventured beyond the classroom to study languages in Kenya, India, the Himalayas, and the Scottish Highlands. In the linguistic world where a debate still sizzles over whether the world’s languages are generated by individual cultures or built on a similar foundation, Adger stands firmly on the latter side. Languages do not vary randomly, he says. “They have a design, a structure, a pattern, in common.” Despite that seeming constraint, Adger argues in his new book, Language Unlimited, that the sentences we make are infinite in faculty, form, and expression. Language “is the engine of imagination,” he writes.

***

"I asked him to crystallize the argument of his new book for me, and he didn’t hesitate. “It’s an argument about our creative use of language,” he said. “We have a specialized kind of mental technology that neither animals nor computers have. That’s the capacity to combine individual bits of language, and then out of that build larger meanings.”

***

"humans can combine these into highly complex structures that carry new meanings. That doesn’t seem to happen with animals.

"Now, apes and chimpanzees and bonobos are really bright. They’re amazing creatures. But bonobos don’t do syntax. If you look carefully at the way that they respond to us trying to teach them language, they’re using their general intelligence to figure out what they think we might want, or what we might be trying to say to them. Our language locks the meanings into place by the way that the things are combined together. We can’t make animals do this. It would be like trying to teach humans to do bee dances.

***

"I want to say, “No, look at the amazing complexity of languages around the world, and look at how unified it all is.” I wanted to take people’s minds away from this notion of grammar as something dry and boring, and something that people get told at school, and convey this fact that combining words into sentences is a wonder. It’s a marvelous aspect of our human universe. It takes us as finite beings and gives us almost infinite capacity to create new worlds of imagination.

***

"The really core human thing is the creation of hierarchical sentence structures called “Merge.” And what’s interesting about Merge is it doesn’t do much apart from create these hierarchies for you and link them to word orders and meanings. If you think about a sentence in a language, we don’t really think much about what we’re saying, they just come out, and hopefully convey what we mean. However, if you begin to look carefully at sentences, what you find is that they are organized in this hierarchy.

***

"You find that same pattern—things that get attached to the verb—in language after language.
That tells me there’s some underlying deep structure to how human language organizes sentences.

***

"Our general cognitive abilities have a subset of concepts. And some subsets are available to human languages and some are not. No one understands why. It’s a total mystery. But it speaks to this universality of the idea that, in a sense, there’s one human language.

***

"According to Dan [Everett], I think, Pirahã has a hierarchical structure. It’s just that he thinks the hierarchal structure is flat, and therefore Pirahã doesn’t make use of this massive recursive device. But it does. It builds up flat, small structures. As far as I understand, recent work on Pirahã shows that you have this ability to stack noun phrases at the start of the sentence to mark them as the topic of the conversation. So I think Pirahã just looks like another language. It has all of the normal properties that languages have. It just likes flat structures, apparently."

Comment: He is with Chomsky and feels Everett is wrong. He supports the idea we are born with a basic language mechanism.