The Core Of Language And Recursion

[psionl0]

I just don't see how that works. They accuse him of being racist. Why?

Maybe they are using the term "racist" recursively.

 

[angrysoba]

Has this thread died through lack of interest?

That's a shame as it has piqued my interest.

I've ordered Everett's book "Language the Cultural Tool" and hopefully I will be able to get round to reading it in the near-future so I may return with a synopsis of his claims.

So, thanks for bringing it to my attention, Travis.

 

[Travis]

Well it has been awhile since I saw the documentary but in it Everett says in one interview that someone wrote the Brazilian government and accused him of "racist research" and this was why he couldn't travel into the field for more data. It was also why the linguistic department at the university of Brasilia boycotted his speech there.

 

[angrysoba]

Well it has been awhile since I saw the documentary but in it Everett says in one interview that someone wrote the Brazilian government and accused him of "racist research" and this was why he couldn't travel into the field for more data. It was also why the linguistic department at the university of Brasilia boycotted his speech there.

Well, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that anyone has accused him of "racist research", only an allegation that some nameless person (who must also be a Chomsky fan, naturally!) has done so.

I've now dug up a New York Times article which seems to talk a lot of crap about this debate:

To Dr. Everett, Pirahã was a clear case of culture shaping grammar — an impossibility according to the theory of universal grammar.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/22/b...e-amazonian-language.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

I don't think that it is "impossible" for culture to shape grammar, according to universal grammar, from what I understand of it. In fact the specific grammar that a person speaks will almost be completely determined by the culture a person grows up in.

I've received Everett's book and maybe I should start leafing through it to find the specific claims he makes rather than get my news mediated by tabloid press, but I can't be bothered right now.

 

[angrysoba]

Well, I'm in to the third chapter of Language: The Cultural Tool, and so far, although it is a little difficult to summarize his argument he essentially argues that language is not a biological instinct in the sense that Chomsky and Pinker see it as, and he doesn't believe there are specific language genes, per se. He argues that while there are certainly going to be genes that happen to assist with the production of language, language is more likely something that evolved culturally in the same way that, say, our use of fire did.

We could summarize the relevance of genes to language by saying that, just as genes in humans are not linked in some rigid and predictable fashion to human behaviour, neither is the output of all our communicative components predictable from the nature of the individual components of communication.

 

[steenkh]

Well, I'm in to the third chapter of Language: The Cultural Tool, and so far, although it is a little difficult to summarize his argument he essentially argues that language is not a biological instinct in the sense that Chomsky and Pinker see it as, and he doesn't believe there are specific language genes, per se. He argues that while there are certainly going to be genes that happen to assist with the production of language, language is more likely something that evolved culturally in the same way that, say, our use of fire did.

Does he mention the studies of creole languages that seem to support the idea of a built-in grammar?

 

[angrysoba]

Does he mention the studies of creole languages that seem to support the idea of a built-in grammar?

He's briefly mentioned it, and flicking through the index I see he will return to it near the end of the book. Tok Pisin is mentioned too.

I remember also that Pinker talks a bit about Hawaiian creoles in The Language Instinct, that what start out as pidgins gain regularized grammar.

Maybe, but I remember thinking that Pinker seemed to hedge in Words and Rules whereby he agreed with one of the connectionist claims that essentially irregular verbs are largely to do with exposure to enough of them.

 

[epeos76]

For purposes of citation:

I can't speeak to the bit about actions by Chomsky's adherents, but the linguist who proposed the idea that this tribe has a language without recursion published a popular book on the topic called, "Don't Sleep, there are Snakes" that describes how this would change a major tenet of Chomsky's thinking on this subject.

 

[angrysoba]

For purposes of citation:

I can't speeak to the bit about actions by Chomsky's adherents, but the linguist who proposed the idea that this tribe has a language without recursion published a popular book on the topic called, "Don't Sleep, there are Snakes" that describes how this would change a major tenet of Chomsky's thinking on this subject.

Some of the more academic papers can be looked at by working backwards from here (this is Everett's reply in Language 2009 to a paper which was in reply to his 2005 paper which was in reply to a 2002 paper which was...):

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/language/v085/85.2.everett.html

 

[Loss Leader]

Having closely watched two humans learn to speak, my impression is that the desire to copy adults is innate. I don't think a communication system can be devised without being taught.

Is this the subject of the thread? I'm way out of my area.

 

[angrysoba]

Having closely watched two humans learn to speak, my impression is that the desire to copy adults is innate.

There clearly does seem to be some imitation by children of adults, but my understanding of universal grammar and language instinct is that it is not simply a desire to copy adults. Pinker, for example, says somewhat tongue-in-cheekily, that if that were the case, children would sit still on planes. But more than that, Pinker and Chomsky generally think that children get their language from their peers as much, if not more, than from adults including parents. They also cite some examples of ethnic groups where Motherese is almost completely absent (I'm not sure how well the claims hold up), and Chomsky also dubbed the problem of not knowing what grammar is false, the "poverty of the stimulus" problem. He thought that basically children don't get enough exposure to the whole grammatical system to be able to make empirical judgments about what constitutes correct and incorrect grammar yet they manage to speak language perfectly within a few years. On the other hand, adults trying to learn second languages often find it impossible. This, I think, is one of the main arguments for saying that some kind of language structure in the brain must be innate and instinctual.

I don't think a communication system can be devised without being taught.

Is this the subject of the thread? I'm way out of my area.

The main point of the thread is that if we accept Chomsky's idea that there could be some basic fundamental grammar which is innate then what does it consist of? It's quite hard to pin down any specifics, but at one time it seems that Chomsky suggested "recursion". Daniel Everett, a linguist who studied the Piraha people's language in the Amazon had suggested that they don't have recursion. Then there was some back and forth about it, and both sides seemed to drop their initial claims, but Everett still thinks that Chomsky's universal grammar is wrong and believes there are better explanations for language.

 

[Loss Leader]

The main point of the thread is that if we accept Chomsky's idea that there could be some basic fundamental grammar which is innate then what does it consist of? It's quite hard to pin down any specifics, but at one time it seems that Chomsky suggested "recursion". Daniel Everett, a linguist who studied the Piraha people's language in the Amazon had suggested that they don't have recursion. Then there was some back and forth about it, and both sides seemed to drop their initial claims, but Everett still thinks that Chomsky's universal grammar is wrong and believes there are better explanations for language.

Then it doesn't seem to me that grammar is innate. The first step in language for children are words that function both as nouns and as verbs. "Milk," the first word spoken by my eldest, meant, "please give me milk." All of his noun/verbs were completely self-centered. It seems likely to me that this and a lot of pointing were the sum total of communication in human ancestors.

I also read an excellent book, The Unfolding of Language, which gives many examples of languages with completely different grammatical structures. Turkish is spoken almost completely backwards (object-verb-subject). Latin grammar is far more complex that the system we have today.

There may be an innate desire for pattern-matching, but I doubt there is an innate sense of grammar.

 

[The Man]

Then it doesn't seem to me that grammar is innate. The first step in language for children are words that function both as nouns and as verbs. "Milk," the first word spoken by my eldest, meant, "please give me milk." All of his noun/verbs were completely self-centered. It seems likely to me that this and a lot of pointing were the sum total of communication in human ancestors.

I also read an excellent book, The Unfolding of Language, which gives many examples of languages with completely different grammatical structures. Turkish is spoken almost completely backwards (object-verb-subject). Latin grammar is far more complex that the system we have today.

There may be an innate desire for pattern-matching, but I doubt there is an innate sense of grammar.

I think that may be the crux Loss Leader, that grammar when learned as the more fundamental portions of the brain are still developing tends to be more hard wired and thus some adults (much like myself) have difficulty learning new languages. While exposure to different grammatical forms while at a young age can result in better language skills as an adult.

 

[Brian-M]

There clearly does seem to be some imitation by children of adults, but my understanding of universal grammar and language instinct is that it is not simply a desire to copy adults. Pinker, for example, says somewhat tongue-in-cheekily, that if that were the case, children would sit still on planes.

I suspect that the tendency to imitate adult action does not extend to imitation of adult inaction.

 

[angrysoba]

Then it doesn't seem to me that grammar is innate. The first step in language for children are words that function both as nouns and as verbs. "Milk," the first word spoken by my eldest, meant, "please give me milk." All of his noun/verbs were completely self-centered. It seems likely to me that this and a lot of pointing were the sum total of communication in human ancestors.

I also read an excellent book, The Unfolding of Language, which gives many examples of languages with completely different grammatical structures. Turkish is spoken almost completely backwards (object-verb-subject). Latin grammar is far more complex that the system we have today.

There may be an innate desire for pattern-matching, but I doubt there is an innate sense of grammar.

That sounds like an interesting book. I have Deutscher's The Language Mirror which also takes aim at another aspect of Pinker's liguistics, that language doesn't influence perception. He argues that it does, although the actual theory is a bit of a featherbed compared to how the book seems to be marketed. One point he makes in that book, and probably in the one that you read, was that languages are not all equally complex, as was asserted by structuralists and Chomskyans. It is difficult to even know what it means for all languages to be equally complex, as many of them have simpler tenses, more or less regularity, larger or smaller vocabularies, some languages include something called evidentiality which Deutscher tentatively suggests may alter the way a person speaking that language sees the world. The idea is that grammatically, a person is obliged at all times to say how they came by that knowledge, i.e show their evidence for a claim.

But, yeah, I think you are right that initially functions are more important than form, and it is syntactic form that Chomsky and Pinker place at the centre of their idea about language. Even worse, in my opinion, is that they seem to think of language as a set of propositions or sentences, whereas I think language is obviously far more complicated than that.

I suspect that the tendency to imitate adult action does not extend to imitation of adult inaction.

Well, as I said, that example was only semi-serious, but really although there is some imitation, I would think that generally children behave quite differently from adults most of the time. They tend to be interested in different things and interact with people differently to the way adults do. Generally.

As far as language goes, adults speak differently to children too. The Chomskyans argue that if it was all about imitation then children would copy stutters and false starts, which they say children don't. Somehow, according to Chomskyans, children seem to be able to recognize the bits of talk that are not part of the language they are learning and not imitate it. One phenomenon that these linguists are very interested in is the way that while children initially do imitate irregular plurals (mice) and irregular verbs (went), at some point they seem to become aware of an underlying regular plural and past tense and start saying "The mouses goed into the house" etc... and don't recognize corrections easily.

 

[abaddon]

Then it doesn't seem to me that grammar is innate. The first step in language for children are words that function both as nouns and as verbs. "Milk," the first word spoken by my eldest, meant, "please give me milk." All of his noun/verbs were completely self-centered. It seems likely to me that this and a lot of pointing were the sum total of communication in human ancestors.

I also read an excellent book, The Unfolding of Language, which gives many examples of languages with completely different grammatical structures. Turkish is spoken almost completely backwards (object-verb-subject). Latin grammar is far more complex that the system we have today.

There may be an innate desire for pattern-matching, but I doubt there is an innate sense of grammar.

Not sure that is correct. The demand "Milk" expands to "Give milk" expands to "Give me milk" and so forth. There seems to be an inate drift toward grammar.
You might say that is just learning from the grown ups, but it appears not from the research. There really is something in there that is built in, but it is poorly understood. Kids learn language in a repeated sequence across all cultures, nouns first, then verbs, and so forth. Syntax seems to be secondary.

 

[angrysoba]

Not sure that is correct. The demand "Milk" expands to "Give milk" expands to "Give me milk" and so forth. There seems to be an inate drift toward grammar.
You might say that is just learning from the grown ups, but it appears not from the research. There really is something in there that is built in, but it is poorly understood. Kids learn language in a repeated sequence across all cultures, nouns first, then verbs, and so forth. Syntax seems to be secondary.

The fact that language seems to develop in children across various cultures in a similar order may well be true but doesn't mean that there is an innate grammar.

It could be argued that children's cognitive skills develop in a similar order across cultures which allows them to put various aspects of language to use at roughly the same time. Children tend to learn to read and write in a fairly predictable order as well, although admittedly the innatists point out that this is explicitly something that must be taught whereas spoken language need not be.

 

[angrysoba]

For those who are interested, when Pinker's book, The Language Instinct, first came out, Michael Tomasello wrote a pretty damning review, in which he puts in a ratherly subtley dismissive line in his conclusion:

In the preface to his book, Pinker states that “My home institution, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a special environment for the
study of language.” All I have tried to do here is to underscore that
statement, so that developmentalists who do not study language for a living
can see the claims of this popular book for what they are: the theoretical
positions of one side of a debate presented as if they were the only side.

http://www.princeton.edu/~adele/MTLngNotInstinct.pdf

Essentially, he argues that most of the evidence that Pinker puts forward in his book can be interpreted in various ways, or in some cases has established nothing at all, or has been debunked etc...

For example, in the previously mentioned case of creoles, Pinker seems to be relying on Bickerton's work which is not by any means established fact. Some linguists (such as Dell Hymes) think that the grammar of creoles are basically derived from one of the parent languages and not, as seems to be suggested, created by child native speakers of creole. Besides, Tomasello points out that we really don't know anyway, as Bickerton's research came long after creolization had occurred, and the native-creole first generation may indeed have been exposed to and used the native tongue of adult speakers:

The idea is that the children must have supplemented their
impoverished “input” with syntactic structures from their innate language
“bioprogram.”
The commentaries to Bickerton’s (1984) paper, however, make it clear
that the language-learning situations of these children are not well known.
They all occurred in the relatively distant past (in Bickerton’s case of the
creoles of Hawaii, 70-100 years ago), so what the children heard is uncertain.
The adult pidgin speakers by definition all had dominant languages
that they used in some contexts (e.g., when speaking to other native speakers
of their dominant language), and it is unclear to what extent the
children heard these languages. Maratsos (1984) points out that a number
of linguistic entities in the creole data Bickerton reports could only have
come from one of the dominant natural language from which the pidgins
derived, and Samarin (1984) and Seuren (1984) point out a number of facts
about the demographics of pidgins and creoles showing that the children
in question had much more exposure to natural languages than Bickerton
has supposed. The case for children supplementing impoverished “input”
cannot be made until we know what the “input” was.

 

[The Man]

But, yeah, I think you are right that initially functions are more important than form, and it is syntactic form that Chomsky and Pinker place at the centre of their idea about language. Even worse, in my opinion, is that they seem to think of language as a set of propositions or sentences, whereas I think language is obviously far more complicated than that.

Well that was part of the problem I was trying to communicate before. Syntactic form and function. The basic function to be to communicate. Take away the syntax of verbal (even sign or other) language and you just reduce it to an innate need or desire to communicate. Let's take "Oedipus rex" or "king Oedipus" though literally translated "Oedipus king". Syntactically different but recursively the same. Does the person modify the title or the title modify the person, both are equally recursive. Syntax has bearing particularly sociologically and language is a sociological exercise of communication. Sorry if I'm harping on an issue already dismissed (by both parties in the OP conflict) but once you reduce language (innate or otherwise) to just recursion you lose the fundamental element of, and need that developed, language, more exacting communication.


Our cat communicates with us and us with her quite effectively. On her end it is more physical than vocal (though vocal at times). On our end it tends to be more vocal then physical (just in most circumstances, she is a cat) relying more on tonalities than what is actually said. No recursion possible but communication is still effective. So I remain at my position that the need for communication seems to be innate but syntax, grammar and method are pretty much all up for grabs.

 

[steenkh]

[…] some languages include something called evidentiality which Deutscher tentatively suggests may alter the way a person speaking that language sees the world. The idea is that grammatically, a person is obliged at all times to say how they came by that knowledge, i.e show their evidence for a claim.

Really? I have never heard of that before. Are native speakers of those languages more skeptically minded than others?