Sorry to be a couple of days late with this but I just noticed an obituary for George Miller whose work I have admired for many decades. I tend to think of him as a founder of psycholinguistics (along with Chomsky) but he did many more things than thatl. One of his main techniques was to point a promising graduate student or two in a promising direction and let them become the founders of a new subdivision of cognitive psychology.
In his autobiography, Bastard Tongues, Derek Bickerton said that most science papers don't lead to anything, either for the author or for others. I suppose that's so, but papers as a class remain the seeds of science. That's where ideas and facts are passed around. I'm not sure how many papers I have discussed on this blog, but it is in the hundreds and some few have turned my thinking around. Others have opened horizons I didn't even realize were out there. Here's my list of the must-read papers for understanding language origins. I thought I would whittle the list down to the top ten, but I couldn't shave it quite that close.
I'm growing more excited about my book, due out this September. I've begun to get some good blurbs and hope for more. As part of the prologue to publication I think from time to time I will post a video on YouTube in which I discuss an aspect of the blog and book. Today's post is the first. Readers through a subscription or RSS service may not be able to start the video from this site. You can find it here.
Note: Once before I posted a video and received a protest from a deaf visitor that she could not hear what I was saying. So below is the text of my video.
I was always an obedient kid, not much given to swiping things from candy stores or talking sass at my parents, so it might seem odd that since childhood I have pursued a forbidden line of research. Of course, I didn't know it was forbidden when I first got interested. I only learned its disreputable nature in college. One evening there I attended one of those after-hours discussions that the school used to hold for students and visiting scholars. In this case the scholar was a distinguished literary scholar, a Jesuit priest named Walter Ong. He said something, from this distance I have no recall what, and I asked, "If that's so, how could language have ever begun?"
Arches are part of nature. They just need a keystone to support the two sides.
What's the relationship between cooperation and understanding? I ask because I've been reading a paper about simulating cooperation that studies the way verbal cooperation aids understanding. (Carl Vogel, "Interaction of Levels ofCooperation and Group Cohesion in a Social Model of Language Evolution") The simulation took a naïve form, as is commonly imposed by efforts to mimic human interactions on a computer. When you think how much computational effort is required to support a machine playing chess or Jeopardy, you realize that it will be some time before even sophisticated ape interactions can be simulated, let alone plausible human conversations. Even so, these small efforts encourage a thought. Language is the keystone that brings cooperation and understanding together.
"Like all science stories, this one begins with wonder." That's how Babel's Dawn the book starts. I''m quoting it because a dispute has popped up in the comments section on how science works and what sorts of questions are best asked. I was thinking one way, then another about my response and then I remembered how I began my manuscript and I thought, oh, yeah, wonder. There are lots of things to wonder about language: How did it begin? Is it really different from other forms of animal communication? How do words get meaning? What's a verb? Why do children learn to speak so easily while other animals don't learn it at all? Why can users ignore some rules and still be understood?
Fify years ago there was a scientific revolution that overthrew the tectonic ideas of the time and made sense of many old mysteries and new ones too. Is it time for a similar revolution in linguistics?
Steve Levinson and Nicolas Evans have become the bomb-throwers of linguistics. Last year they published a paper titled "The Myth of Language Universals" that caused an uproar merely by citing the facts of linguistic diversity. (See: Is Anything Universal in Language?) It was a direct challenge to the idea of a Universal Grammar (UG). Now the two authors have published a further paper, this one in Lingua, titled, "Time for a Sea-Change in Linguistics," that hurls another bomb into the UG den (abstract here). They propose a different focus from the one that generativists have pursued lo these past fifty years, and they do not couch their argument in polite language.
I wonder if anybody reading this blog is planning on attending the University of Quebec in Montreal's institute next month on the Origins of Language. If (1) you do plan to be there and (2) are interested in being an unpaid (but credited) reporter of the event, please send me a message off line at [email protected]..
The Cognitive Science Institute of the Université du Québec (Montréal) is holding a summer program to study the origins of language. Interested? Check it out at http://www.summer10.isc.uqam.ca/page/intro.php
Fill in the blank, but remember that when you do, a whole view of language comes with it. So don't try to argue that the word you chose is neutral or can serve as the basis of a consensus.
One of the big differences between science and philosophy is the way scientists agree about many points while philosophers can dispute everything. That fact alone suggests that language studies in general, and the study of language origins in particular is still much more philosophy than science.
Tecumseh Fitch says of biolinguistics, “I know of no other field where scholars seem so ready to champion their own pet hypothesis uncritically, while rejecting those of others as ludicrous” [p. 286 of “Prolegomena to a Future Science of Biolinguistics”].
Historically, pretty much every scholarly field was like that. But as astrology became astronomy and alchemy was transformed into chemistry something new appeared. Disputes persisted on the edge of research, but a consensus had been achieved on fundamentals. Fitch’s essay in the current issue of the online journal Biolinguistics is an attempt to propose a consensus. It’s a noble ambition. Does he succeed?
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