Noam Chomsky lectures on the existence of language
The University of Cologne has posted a couple of videos of lectures by Noam Chomsky, one of them on language. The language lecture is titled What Is Special About Language? The lecture runs a bit over an hour and a follow up Q and A adds another half hour, so it is not a quick distraction, but the video is well worth studying. Chomsky is a clear speaker and gets to the heart of his matter. I always come away from his work with a stronger sense of what makes my own thinking different. In this case I'm particularly struck by our contrasting views over what evolved..
A naive observer might say this is a group of people strung out one after another, but someone more familiar with lines will know there is some kind of more complex social hierarchy here. Getting to handle such things was part of our history..
The current issue of the online journal Biolinguistics is devoted to the subject of recursion, a procedure that enables the creation of sentences of indeterminate length. Last week's post discussed an article that doubts "full-blown recursion" is part of language. Another important paper in the issue is The Neural Basis of Recursion and Complex Syntactic Hierarchy by Angela D. Friederici, Jörg Bahlmann, Roland Friedrich & Michiru Makuuchi. Based on a series of experiments, it concludes that hierarchical thinking is common to many tasks besides syntax. Most striking is the evidence that mathematical thinking uses different parts of the brain from syntactical thinking and therefore (says I) evidence of unbounded recursion in mathematical reasoning cannot be used to support unbounded recursion in "the language faculty."
I got into the matter of language origins initially because I rejected the possibility of an infinite regress. Could it be, however, that infinite repeitition is the key to language after all?
The online journal, Biolinguistics, has published an issue devoted to the matter of recursion, and it looks as though everyone interested in the details of language origins will have to be familiar with the issue's arguments. In 2002 the Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch paper put forth the proposition that there is a faculty of language, i.e. a biological system supporting language, that can be divided into a narrow and a broad sense. The broad sense includes all those biological supports that are shared with other members of the animal kingdom. An example of such a trait might be navigation abilities that let us understand the many spatial references common to all languages.
The narrow sense includes any biological abilities that support language and are exclusive to humans. The only example given of a narrow faculty was recursion: the ability to create a new sentence by taking an existing sentence and using a repetitive process to change it. For example, take the sentence The big dog chased the calico cat and turn it into a new sentence: The big dog that Freddy got for his birthday chased the calico cat. This new sentence was generated by taking the old sentence and inserting a phrase. That's an instance of recursion.
I've posted another video about the Babel's Dawn project. If you cannot click it and get it going you can find it here. For those of you who prefer reading, the transcrip is below:
I was raised loving libraries. I got my first library card when I was six years old. My eighth grade teacher, Mrs. Abrams, was a former librarian and she taught us all the secrets of using them. We learned the Dewey Decimal System and how to use card catalogs. In graduate school I was in the library more than I was out of it. Working on books I used the New York public library so much that my mother began sending them money, and she didn’t even live in New York. So I think I know just how radical a statement I’m making when I say I never could have written my book on speech origins, Babel’s Dawn, if I had depended on libraries alone. Or at least the kind of institution Mrs. Abrams would have recognized as a library. My book is about things that happened millions of years ago, but it could only have been written in the 21st century.
This post first appeared on the Scientific American website as a guest blog post. You can still check it out here and see the comments it inspired.
The most important sign language study done with an ape was surely the first one back in the 1960s, with Washoe, for it established that chimpanzees can use American Sign Language (ASL). The most decisive such study, however, was probably the one a decade later, with Nim Chimsky because it put a halt to such inquiries. Herbert Terrace, the lead investigator, announced he had changed his mind (always a eye-catching action). Terrace began the project expecting to see that a chimpanzee could master sign language. At first, the data had seemed to support that hypothesis. However, upon closer examination Terrace realized that Nim did not engage in much spontaneous expression. Nim's use of signs was a way of controlling his human attendants. He was not sharing information or conversing. Now a documentary film, Project Nim, has come along to leave me with a sense that the Nim project was a scientific scandal. No conclusions, one way or the other, should be based on it, except for the indisputable fact that Nim did learn to make a number of signs and would sometimes string them together.
The New York Times today has a report that includes this passage:
As in many other animals, communication among spotted hyenas serves different functions, including individual identification, recruitment of allies, reinforcement of social bonds among individual clan members, indication of social status, coordination of group activities and modulation of aggression among clan mates.
That long list often inspires people to ask why anyone thinks language is exclusive to humans. Readers of this blog can answer that it doesn't include the speech triangle (mutual contemplation of topics). Chomsky would point out the lack of structure and flexibility. Literary critics would mention the absence of voice and point of view.
Skeptics about exclusivity are often tempted to denigrate what language can do, but they are most persuasive when they point out how much animals can do. You've got to respect that kind of defense and know your own ground too..
Genes used to be imagined as beads on a string, each one distinct from the other. Now they are thought of as points in a network of connections. We pause now to think what the change in metaphors implies.
The story of speech/language origins can be told on a variety of levels—linguistic, cultural, behavioral, neurological, and genomic, to name a few. The genome changes remain the most mysterious, mainly because we aren't clear on how much of language depends on abilities already present in apes, how much has been added by culture, and what comes from biological changes that have happened since the human lineage separated from the chimpanzee/bonobo lineage. Still, we are making progress on this level's story and it looks quite different from the one expected a few years ago. I've been reminded of the change by a paper from Constance Scharff and Jane Petri, "Evo-Devo, Deep Homology, and FoxP2: implications for the evolution of speech and language."
Recent Comments