ksagnostic

Concerning Pinker.

When reading Pinker, it is important to keep in mind that he is a linguist and that his theoretical approach to human language acquisition is a strong innatism. The strong innatist position is that human language is largely hard wired into the human brain. This theoretical bias greatly colors his more general speculations and writings on neurology and behavior. As a result, Pinker tends to lean more towards the nature end of nature-nurture continuum.

I myself think the strong innatist position is extremely weak, not to mention unnecessary. I think that human language acquisition can largely be explained by invoking a more general tendency for any large brained, complex social creature to acquire his/her species' communication system. No specific language acquisition device or module is needed. Of course, that is my own bias.

RufusAtticus

Really? Some, evidence for innateness off the top of my head.

1. Specific language "organs" in the brain.
2. Children will naturally develop a language in a social setting even if they have no language of their own. (See Nicaraguan sign language.)
3. FOXP2, a gene for language that when "broken" produces both grammar and motor disfunction.

But many humans don't acquire his/her species' communication system. Take deaf children, who had to invent their own language instead of acquiring one.

Actually, specific language acquisition devices are needed. If we don't have cognative (communication) biases, then we can't properly attach meanings to words with the fidelity needed to have a stable communication system. If I were to show you the following picture and say "yoforja" what would you think I was refering to.


Okay, that was probably a bad one because there is too much going on. How about this one: "trelainop."


Now what is a "trelainop" and why do you think that?

ksagnostic

Rufus.

I just spent an hour on a reply to you, hit a key twice, and effing LOST IT!!!!!!

FUCK!

I'll be back, I've got to go to work helping my students to acquire language.

DAMMIT!!!

RufusAtticus

ks,

When you do, please start a new thread. A discussion about the innateness of language ability requires it's own thread.

Doubting Didymus

Okay, but before you leave for more on-topic pastures, can you just explain what yoforja and trelainop are about? Unless yoforja means "man attempting to record voice of statue of frog" and trelainop means "picture of chimpanzee perched atop fast food restauraunt napkin dispensor", then I am all at sea.

Corey Hammer

Your examples aren't so much indicative of a LAD as they are about how humans take in and analyze sensory stimuli. It's like pointing at an apple and saying "apple." Is it the color, the shape...? Usually, people will take "apple" to mean the whole object, not a feature or action of it.

lpetrich

Although I agree that there is good reason to believe that our species has a "language instinct", it must be pointed out that many features of language are learned. This can be demonstrated by comparing features of natural languages.

Sound-meaning correspondence is essentially nonexistent, with the only exception being sound-imitation words. And even those are often variable; English speakers "translate" dog barks into "bow-wow", "woof woof", "arf arf", etc.

Overall phonological similarities can easily be explained by the mechanics of a universally-shared mouth and throat architecture. For example, n + b always gets turned into mb because mb is easier to pronounce than nb.

Interestingly, many languages distinguish sounds that others do not distinguish; such sets of sounds get treated as variants or allophones in some high-level sound or phoneme.

As to semantic structure and grammar, I wonder if the numerous cross-language similarities are due to the structure of the world we live in and to mathematical logic. Can the division of words into noun-like and verb-like categories be a result of either cause or both?

There is some famous work on color words that demonstrates that color names always refer to the same parts of color charts. This is related to how color perception works -- it's a universally-shared mechanism to within genetic defects like colorblindness.

Likewise, the abundance of base-10 number systems is a side effect of having 10 fingers.

But despite such similarities, there are numerous variations.

English's preferred sentence word order is subject-verb-object, and many other languages have that order, but many other languages prefer subject-object-verb.

Adjectives can either come before the nouns they modify, as in English, or come after them. In some languages, the equivalent of prepositions is at the end of a prepositional phrase instead of at the beginning ("postpositions").

Gender/classifier systems vary widely, from natural (English) to purely formal with little semantic justification. Which genders get used vary widely:

None
Male female
Male female neuter
Common neuter
Lots of categories (Bantu languages, Chinese)

Adjective-noun agreement is sometimes present, sometimes not.

English has articles (a, an, the); many languages have them, and many languages don't.

The amount of morphology varies widely; there is wide variation in what grammatical features can get packed into a word. English has very little of that; some languages have much more.

ps418

I have just started reading a book by Ullica Segerstrale titled
Defenders of the Truth , which focuses on the debate over sociobiology. No matter what you think about EP or sociobiology scientifically, I dont think you can read the book and not be disgusted by the behavior of many of the critics of sociobiology (with some shining exceptions, such as Ernst Mayr).

Mayr himself was not a fan of sociobiology, but expressed disgust at the way Gould and Lewontin and other critics went about attacking it. Referring to the early attacks on sociobiology, Mayr asked rhetorically 'Why could these crooked Marxists not be honest?' (Segerstrale, p. 17). I'll write a summary of the book when I'm done.


Patrick