A short piece by Patrick Trettenbrein on “The ‘grammar’ in Universal Grammar” briefly defends the concept of a universal grammar (UG), by making the standard Chomskyan arguments. (For my money, Derek Bickerton is the best defender of the notion.) I bring it up because it attempts to rebut an alternative “usage based approach” favored by Tomasello, Christiansen & Chater, and perhaps even this blog. In typical Chomskyan fashion it argues from first principles rather than empirical evidence. The author does not flinch in his metaphysics.
He concedes Tomasello’s point that the claim of a UG “is an unverifiable hypothesis,” but dismisses the objection on the ground that UG is “an axiom par excellence” [section 2.1] and that “questioning the existence of the UG amounts to questioning the existence of human language altogether.”
To understand what he means by questioning language’s existence, look in Trettenbrein’s conclusion where he cites an argument that I have heard Chomsky make. The alternative to the generative view of language, argue the generativists themselves, is to say that language cannot be an “independent object of serious study … [but is] just some arbitrary collection of various phenomena and processes more or less like today’s weather.” [4] My first reaction on hearing Chomsky make that point was to dismiss it as silly. After all, the weather is a subject of serious study supporting both the fields of meteorology and climatology. But on second thought I see Chomsky’s point. The weather is entirely explicable in terms of Newtonian forces. It is very complicated and the results are important, but there are no weather forces that are explicable only in weather-referential terms. It all boils down to physics with maybe a little chemistry thrown in.
So there is a question that seems like a real question: Is language explicable entirely in terms that can be used to describe other things, or does it have something that can only be explained by referring only to language?
Trettenbrein takes for granted the proposition “that something is special about human language” and the genome and brain that supports it. I certainly agreed with that assumption when I began this blog 9 years ago, but I have changed my mind.
The most obvious candidates for language-referential elements are the parts of speech. A noun is a word that refers to a person, place or thing. Nouns do not exist apart from language. Or so I would have said, but earlier this year Giorgio Marchetti’s website published my paper “Attention-Based Syntax,” which seeks to explain syntax in more general terms than the classic noun, verb, etc. Instead of referring to nouns, the paper identifies “static pilots” that pilot attention to static phenomena. Pointing with a finger, or with the nod of a head, or with one’s eyes can accomplish the same thing.
I may be wrong, but Trettenbrein cannot simply assert that he is right. We need evidence.
None of this is to say that linguistics cannot be a true science. The phenomena of language are important and complex enough to merit serious inquiry. After all geology, meteorology, molecular biology and whatever you call the study of the solar system are real and important sciences.
Also, in doubting that language is an independent human faculty, I am not doubting that humans are fundamentally different from our ape cousins. Humans are communal: language is part of that, but so is our ability to love non-kin, our possession of cultural identities, our culturally-based moral codes, our instincts to acquire the culture of our parents, care givers and peers, and our acceptance of culturally imposed responsibilities. That package makes us human. If we had only language, we would not have language for very long. It is the package that has enabled humans to cover, use and perhaps despoil the world.
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