An argument is often made that similarities between languages (so-called “linguistic universals“) provide strong evidence for the existence of an innate, universal grammar (UG) that is shared by all humans, regardless of language spoken.  If language were not underpinned by such a grammar, it is argued, there would be endless (and extreme) variation, of the kind that has never been documented.  Therefore — the reasoning goes — there simply must be design biases that shape how children learn language from the input they receive.

There are several potentially convincing arguments made in favor of innateness in language, but this, I think, is not one of them.

Why?  Let me explain by way of a evolutionary biology:

Both bats and pterodactlys have wings, and both humans and squid have eyes, but neither pair shares a common ancestor that had these traits.  This is because wings and eyes are classic examples of ‘convergent’ evolution — traits that arose in separate species as ‘optimal’ (convergent) solutions to the surrounding environment.  Convergent evolution has always struck me as a subversive evolutionary trick, because it demonstrates how external constraints can produce markedly similar adaptations from utterly different genetic stock.  Not only that, but it upends our commonsense intuitions about how to classify the world around us, by revealing just how powerfully surface similarities can mask differences in origin.

When we get to language, then, it need not be surprising that many human languages have evolved similar means of efficiently communicating information. From an evolutionary perspective, this would simply suggest that various languages have, over time, ‘converged’ on many of the same solutions.  This is made even more plausible by the fact that every competent human speaker, regardless of language spoken, shares roughly the same physical and cognitive machinery, which dictates a shared set of drives, instincts, and sensory faculties, and a certain range of temperaments, response-patterns, learning facilities and so on.  In large part, we also share fairly similar environments — indeed, the languages that linguists have found hardest to document are typically those of societies at the farthest remove from our own (take the Piraha as a case in point).

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I wanted to register a quick reply to some of the comments on last week’s post “The question is : are you dumber than a rat?”  In the comments there, and in posts on other blogs, our research program has been accused of intelligent nihilism.  By one such characterization, our position is that “we don’t how the brain could give rise to a particular type of behavior, so humans must not be capable of it.”  Though I think the label is quite witty — and would love to have badges made for the lab! — I think this misrepresents our stance rather badly ; our argument is that many of the properties that linguists have attributed to language are either empty theoretical constructs (hypotheses that are not supported by the empirical evidence) or are conceptually confused (and have been shown to be so; by Wittgenstein, Quine and many others).  We are not denying that language — and linguistic behavior — are complex; rather, we are rejecting a particular  stance towards language that we think is theoretically and empirically vacuous.  This does not lead us to nihilism, but rather to a different conception of language and how language is learned.

In any case, the comments on last week’s post prove to be fertile ground for discussion, so I’ve posted them (in pared down fashion) along with a brief response.  The full comment thread can be found at the original post.

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Last week, Ben Zimmer published an article in the NY Times on chunking in language.  This morning, I received an email in my inbox from one Prof Plum, who was writing to a parent (a good friend of his) to explain what was right — and what was wrong — with the article.  I was CC’d, as Plum thought I might enjoy the explanation.  I did!  With permission, I have included it below for any interested readers.  But first, here’s Zimmer :

In recent decades, the study of language acquisition and instruction has increasingly focused on “chunking”: how children learn language not so much on a word-by-word basis but in larger “lexical chunks” or meaningful strings of words that are committed to memory. Chunks may consist of fixed idioms or conventional speech routines, but they can also simply be combinations of words that appear together frequently, in patterns that are known as “collocations.” In the 1960s, the linguist Michael Halliday pointed out that we tend to talk of “strong tea” instead of “powerful tea,” even though the phrases make equal sense. Rain, on the other hand, is much more likely to be described as “heavy” than “strong.”

A native speaker picks up thousands of chunks like “heavy rain” or “make yourself at home” in childhood, and psycholinguistic research suggests that these phrases are stored and processed in the brain as individual units. As the University of Nottingham linguist Norbert Schmitt has explained, it is much less taxing cognitively to have a set of ready-made lexical chunks at our disposal than to have to work through all the possibilities of word selection and sequencing every time we open our mouths.

Plum’s response covers why word-chunks are better thought of as a skill than an inventory, how we unconsciously change our speech when we talk on cellphones, and how we can learn verbal humor.

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