A Biolinguistic Agenda?

In their quest for the Great Oz the searchers were advised to keep their eye on the target and to ignore anything else.

Biolingusitics is the studyof the relationship between biology and language. It is what this blog reports on, and I see it as a broad fielod. So I was surprised to find in Science magazine (Nov. 14) is a claim that the subject's "agenda" is a narrow one: "study ... the computational systems inherent in language." [p. 1057] A less jargon-rich definition would say simply that it is the study of how human brains produce language. The paper, by Marc Hauser and Thomas Bever, (available $here$). makes for interesting reading because it shows where riders in biolinguistic's conservative caboose think the train is going, and for the way it clarifies how much our present-day understanding has changed from what it was in the recent past

I say the authors represent the conservative caboose because their paper makes no reference to any of the work presented in Barcelona last March (see:Evolang 2008), or the work of Dediu and Ladd (see: Do Genes Bring up the Rear), or the work of Christiansen and Chater (see: Language Adapted to Us). In fact, the only 2008 reference in the essay is to a study of rat learning (abstract here). Reading the paper was like finding a bottled message tossed from a ship years ago, a reminder of old times.

The Science paper is especially interesting to read after having just read the New York Times special on our modern understanding of the gene.(see: How Did the Speech Triangle Evolve?) in which science historian Evelyn Fox Keller says, "the notion of the gene as the atom of biology is very mistaken. DNA does not come equipped with genes. It comes with sequences that are acted on in certain ways by cells. Before you have cells you don’t have genes."

Eric S. Lander says in the same article, "You can never capture something like an economy, a genome or an ecosystem with one model or one taxonomy — it all depends on the questions you want to ask."

Postmodernism has come to biology. Meaning emerges from the interaction of the whole, as studied by an observer. Biology is not like physics which rests on a few fixed laws. Things that evolve—e.g., biology, language, economics, ecology—follow rules that have themselves evolved. Parts interact more than they obey some fixed hierarchy.

Reading Hauser and Bever illustrates what happens when you try like physicists to find the one, true rule that can link

the formal linguistic principles that describe the mature speaker's knowledge of language to the evolutionary, neurobiological factors that lead to their instantiation in the adult mind. [1057]

The Hauser & Bever agenda seems grossly incomplete. It leaves no room for observations about biolinguistics in which obedience runs the other way (e.g., language adapts to the brain instead of the brain to language). It ignores evidence in which language features can reflect the genes of the neighbors rather than the speaker (e.g.,  tonal languages). It ignores what happens when a "speaker" responds with a gesture rather than a sentence. The "biolinguistic agenda" considered in Science catches the flow only in one direction, from rules in the brain to external "instantiation" of the rule. It ignores the way language can reflect many other things.

The quest to fit everything into Cinderella's one shoe produces many distortions and pseudo-problems; e.g.,

The biggest puzzle ... is why nonhuman animals cannot integrate these computational capacities with their capacity to communicate. So, although songbirds can combine different notes into a variety of songs, they don't integrate this combinatorial capacity with conceptual abilities to create sounds with varied meaning. Understanding what neural connections are absent, or poorly developed, may help account for this evolutionary bottleneck, and explain why human infants readily produce an infinite variety of meaningful expressions. [1058]

Thus, the incompleteness of this agenda leads, to wondering why bird brains cannot support speech. There is no pause for the possibility that birds might talk if they had some reason to share a bit of knowledge, if they had some reason to care what was on another's mind. In short, none of the evolutionary pressures that might lead to speaking are to be considered.

Even when research brings evolutionary issues front and center, the information is dismissed as not on the agenda.The authors consider the discovery that the FOXP2 gene has a role to play in developing songs in birds and echolocation in bats. (See: Birds Also Use FOXP2) The authors are not very interested because neither birds nor bats "productively generate meaningful variation."

Further, the disorders associated with FOXP2 include articulatory disabilities and are not clearly syntactic, semantic, or computational. [1058]

Armed in advance with the truth, there is no need to ask if there might be some relation between the ability to articulate words and the capacity to speak syntactically. Pay no attention, as the great Oz warned, to puzzling evidence on the side.

So what is the biolinguistic agenda? Part of it must be just as the authors say: working out how bits of brain wiring lead to expression. But there is also how speech pushes itself into the brain, how social idiosyncrasies determine what will and won't be said, how the oddities of one person's perception leads to expressions that get lots of people to perceive that same thing and start talking in a new way. Oh, and lots more besides. Perhaps each time we think of a new question, a new way of understanding language will emerge.

Comments

[JoseAngel]

Another critique of a biolinguistic approach in the link above in my name - this one in Spanish. There is a weighty inheritance of generative grammar on this new "gene-"rativism.

[JoseAngel]

Sorry, I meant "the link below".

[Michael]

I also put my two cents in on the topic on my blog.
As Jose Angel said, the term biolinguistics is deeply intertwined with generative grammar - and thus maybe it should not be treated as a term for biologically oriented approaches to language, but as a denominator for the generatively oriented approaches in this vein.

It reminds me a bit of the term psychoanalysis, which also didn't refer to psychological enquiries into the humand mind in general, but only to eqnquiries in the tradition of Sigmund Freud.( I think Noam Chomsky still has a bit more scientific merit than Freud, but you see my point ;-) )

Maybe there should be another term for the other biological oriented-approaches to language.
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BLOGGER: I think the term biolinguistics is too handy to abandon lightly, but the point about psychoanalysis has some merit. Psychotherapy covers a wider range of approaches. Maybe evolutionary linguistics.