Babel's Dawn

A Brain for Resolving Hierarchies

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."

Reconsidering Recursion

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.

Monkey Syntax

The New York Times is reporting (here) that a study of Campbell's Monkey cries in the Ivory Coast has found the use of suffixes to modify the meaning of a call. The monkeys have 6 basic calls which they can modify. For example, krak is the call made in response to seeing a leopard; krak-oo appears to be a modification of the call that indicates the caller only thinks or hears that a leopard is nearby.

boom is an invitational sound (i.e., come to me), but when monkeys combine it with krak-oo to get boom-krak-oo the call signals a falling tree.

For those who stress syntax as the unique element of language, a few dance steps may be needed to explain this one. It sounds like the sort of story we are going to be hearing about for years.

Is Anything Universal in Language?

One of the most basic quarrels about language and its origins has flared up again in a particularly fierce way.

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The question at hand: do the things that all languages have in common reflect certain universals of human thought and experience, or do they reflect the workings of a universal language faculty? Fifty years ago a third answer dominated: languages are learned from scratch and have no universals. That position, however, is still so out of favor that it is not much proposed in the current quarrel.

The latest dispute arises from a stark denial that languages have any peculiar grammatical universals of their own. It amounts to a total rejection of Chomsky’s core idea that the syntax of any individual language reflects an instance of a universal grammar (UG).  Nicholas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson have published a paper in the wonderful journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, “The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science” (uncorrected final draft available here). Also published with the paper were a series of responses including many sharp retorts from generative grammarians who still firmly believe in UG. They score their points, but the fact that the issue has returned underlines the basic fact: after fifty years of proclaiming the existence of a UG, we still don’t know what it is. All in all the paper and responses make for a brutal slugfest.

Intermediate Syntax

Me Tarzan. — You Jane. Could anybody have ever really talked in that super-simple manner?

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A plausible account of the evolution of syntax is coming into view. I had almost despaired. 

Most syntacticians (I believe) still hold the view that syntax must have come as an all or nothing package, a proposition I consider an evolutionary absurdity. 

Second, even when it is discussed in evolutionary or biological contexts syntax is presented in syntactically formal terms that provides no clue as to how the formal operation can be translated into something important to natural selection. 

Finally, I don’t believe syntax, as formally described, is much of a help to people when they are trying to figure out the best way to say something. I know that whenever I give editorial advice, I talk about a completely different set of issues from technical discussions about moving phrases, etc. The formal system is great for mechanical operations in which the machine has no awareness of what it is doing, but does not really address the experience of using language. If editing really worked best at the unconscious level, all these thoughts about helping the reader follow along should just get in the way. Instead, they help get it right.

At the same time, syntax is obviously important and has to be accounted for. “Syntax” was one of the original categories for posting on this blog, but I have long doubted that I would have much to report. Lately, however, things are looking more promising. I am especially encouraged by a paper, “Sex and Syntax” (here) by Ljiljana Progovac in the current Biolinguistics. 

How Old Is Language?

Rene Descartes was probably the last great thinker to try to explain the universe on the basis of definitions and logic alone, but he was not the last savant to explain the mind that way.

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I had thought I would skip reporting on Bart de Boer’s presentation in Torun. I have already covered his work on the loss of air sacs (see: Fossil Evidence of Speech?) in the human lineage. In Torun he presented experimental evidence that strengthens his case for the idea that as precision of speech sounds became more important, the air sacs used for ape vocalizations became a problem, but much of the presentation matched the one given in Barcelona. I changed my mind about reporting, however, after I began looking at the new online issue of Biolinguistics.. One of the papers directly contradicts de Boer’s conclusion, so I thought this might be a good time to take a look at the different approaches.

One of de Boer’s slides (available here) said:

Hypothesis: —Neanderthals could speak, Australopithecines not —(proto) speech is at least 500,000 years old.

Meanwhile a Biolinguistics paper by Dennis Ott (available here) proposes:

It therefore seems reasonable to assume that the human I-language trait is at most 100,000 years old, its emergence having facilitated the ‘Upper Paleolithic Revolution.’ [257; italics author’s]

We seem to have a disagreement of, at a minimum, 400,000 years.

The Word-Sentence Continuum

Run ... women run ... the women are running.

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I managed to inspire a bit of a hullaballoo last week with my contention that protolanguage had done its job and it was now time to discard the term in favor of just talking about language evolution. The founder of the protolanguage concept, Derek Bickerton, posted a comment defending the word’s continuing utility (comment here) and plugging his book. My main point was that once speech got going, it just kept evolving, so we would do better to ask how did it start? and what came next? rather than looking for changes that prepared the way for what followed.

An example of what I mean was given in Jim Hurford’s presentation at the Torun, Poland conference on protolanguage. Two of his “take-away” points were:

• There is a lexicon-syntax continuum (i.e. words evolve into syntax).
• There has been a gradual continuous evolution of syntax.

Hurford discussed the evolution of predicates, the part of a sentence that tells us something about the subject. His very rich analysis suggests that it is the social context that makes the syntax interesting, not the other way around. He then proceeded to show how predication can evolve from social situations without requiring any rewiring of the brain.

Poverty of the Stimulus: Part 2 Solutions

Which will it be? He hit the ball she threw, or The ball hit him she threw.

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Yesterday’s post (here) summarized Noam Chomsky’s victory over behaviorism with his “poverty of the stimulus” paradox, holding that you cannot determine the rules for organizing sentences simply by studying the physical organization of sentences. Today I want to look at possible solutions to the paradox.

Chomsky himself had a solution: between the input and the output lies computation, and the computational system has been preprogrammed to accept certain structures and reject others. This “universal grammar” (often called UG) is inherent in all natural languages. Although there are many conceivable objections to this proposed solution, Chomsky won himself pride of place in the struggle by having overcome the old champion, B.F. Skinner and for many years the dispute was framed between Skinner’s learning theory and Chomsky’s notion of an innate universal grammar.

Poverty of the Stimulus: Part 1 Chomsky 1959

Noam Chomsky long ago. The pen and notebook in the pocket marks the pre-PDA intellectual. (For larger photo see source.)

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Commenter Raymondw provided a reading list for behaviorist rebuttals to Noam Chomsky’s poverty of the stimulus argument. (They are here) It is a valuable list and I hope blog visitors will check it out. This week I’m going to make several posts surveying the “poverty of the stimulus” question and at the end the commenter will provide his reaction to my pontificating.

The Chomskyan revolution is commonly dated to publication of his Syntactic Structures (1957) but I date it a little later, to the 1959 publication of his review of B.F. Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior. (review here) In the 1950s Skinner was considered America’s most important psychologist. He did extensive experimental work with pigeons, training them to do many things using a method called operant conditioning, and he showed beyond the shadow of a doubt that animals could be trained to behave in many surprising ways if the behavior was rewarded. (Punishment worked less well than rewards.) What made Skinner controversial was his insistence that all learning could be explained in terms of a stimulus (feature of the environment) and response (behavior). In today’s computer world we would say input and output, but Skinner didn’t care about internal computations any more than he cared about personal thoughts. Behavior was to be explained under the Newtonian concept of cause and effect, just as the behavior of a billiard ball can be completely explained in terms of the forces striking the ball and setting it in motion.

Questions For A Theory

Nim Chimpsky. If language adapted to our brains, why didn't it adapt so well to his brain?

The previous two posts (here and here) have reported a theory that says:

• Syntax is not arbitrary.
• Syntax evolved by adapting to the human brain.
• Because syntactic rules are adapted to the brain, children can start speaking easily without requiring specially evolved language modules in their brain.

Those two posts focused on explaining the theory and its arguments, so in this final post I want to look at some of its problems. My own opinion is that the article (“Language as Shaped by the Brain” by Morton H. Christiansen and Nick Chater in Behavioral and Brain Sciences; final draft here) marks a great stride that ties together many trends in the study of speech origins, but there are still some questions, starting with the FOXP2 gene. We know that speaking proper language depends on this gene, so how can Christiansen/Chater dismiss the claim that syntax is the result of biological evolution?