3. Theories of grammar and language acquisition
3.5. Debating Universal Grammar
Since Chomsky proposed Universal Grammar in the 1960s, it has split the field of linguistics in two—those who adopt his hypothesis and those who don’t. Unfortunately, both sides of the debate are really bad at communicating and collaborating with each other. Both sides tend to argue against and make fun of (over)simplified versions of the other side.
For example, here is a pair of excerpts from an op-ed and a blog post in the wake of Vyvyan Evans’ 2014 book The Language Myth.
“I was, of course, expecting a negative reaction from Chomsky’s disciples. But, given the practice in normal science, I was expecting a debate, and in particular, a challenge, with argument and evidence, to the substantive criticisms I levelled against the Chomskyan enterprise. This, it seemed to me, would have been a profitable way to take the field forwards. But things, at least, amongst some of Chomsky’s die-hard followers, haven’t panned out like that. In various fora, the reaction has sometimes appeared to border on the hysterical. For instance, in various public on-line venues I have been described as an ‘idiot’ and a ‘quack’, and The Language Myth has been repeatedly derided as ‘junk’ and ‘junk science’; there has been a public debunking exercise led by a ‘panel’ of experts, embroidered with scorn and disdain, conducted in venues ranging from Facebook to Reddit. One prominent, and influential Chomskyan supporter, Professor Norbert Hornstein, has devoted, by now, an extraordinary number of posts to what amounts to a slim volume aimed at the general public, in his Faculty of Language Blogspot. He has repeatedly railed against The Language Myth, even issuing a call to (intellectual) arms: ‘criticize this in all venues, especially where non-linguists gather. Consider it part of your linguistic public service’ (December 2014).
-Evans 2015 (Source)
Hornstein responds in the same vein:
I was going to write something long and pointed in response to this new piece by Vyvyan Evans (VE). I was going to analyze the article noting its inflated combination of self-pity (those ‘Chomsky disciples’ are saying that my work is junk) and self-aggrandizement (I am the leader of a Kuhnian paradigm shift that will overthrow the Chomskyan orthodoxy that, prior to the heroic efforts of people like me, who are now being viciously pilloried by the intellectually enervated Generative establishment, has had a stranglehold on linguistic pedagogy). I was going to note that VE has yet to address a single criticism leveled against his work, preferring instead to personalize the disagreement in a two fold manner; first by noting his personal travails in fighting the Chomskyan dragon and second by citing the approval of various authorities and luminaries that think him and his work wonderful. However, despite the obvious temptations that VE’s public demeanor make almost irresistible, his latest piece has convinced me that nothing much will be gained by doing this (fun as it may be).
-Hornstein 2015 (Source)
Besides being rude, this kind of exchange is actually harmful to the advancement of science.
First of all, it is important to remember that just because someone adopts a hypothesis doesn’t mean they think it is true. Often, the only way to test a hypothesis is to assume it is true, and see how far that will take you. Sometimes researchers will follow this line of research because they’re pretty sure it is true, but sometimes researchers will adopt a hypothesis because they think it is wrong. In either case, they would be applying the hypothesis to different sets of data to try and find one where the hypothesis fails to predict the data. The Scientific Method is built on the assumption that your first hypothesis (and probably your second, and your third) will not be correct, but that each time we formulate a hypothesis and test it against new data, our hypothesis will become refined and hopefully closer to the truth.
Second of all, science is usually strongest when there are scientists working on the same problem from multiple perspectives. For example, if we assume that the Universal Grammar hypothesis is false, we might miss hard-to-spot patterns and similarities among the languages of the world. On the other hand, if we assume Universal Grammar is true, we might force languages into boxes where they don’t quite fit. Because scientists are humans who generally become emotionally attached to their research, having skeptics look over your work from the opposite perspective helps to reduce errors.
Thirdly, by not taking each other seriously, we are missing out on half of the available linguistic research! All of our data is relevant to other theories, and even some of our theories can be reformulated to fit into other approaches. In fact, sometimes researchers from different approaches converge on the same solution, which provides a strong case that they are both on the right track. For example, the trend right now in Chomskyan syntax is to try to minimize the Universal Grammar component and explain as much as possible through general cognitive capacities, in a framework known as Minimalism. It is possible that this line of research might lead to the conclusion that Universal Grammar can be attributed entirely to general cognitive capacities.
In sum, Universal Grammar is controversial and has resulted in a lot of contentious debate. However, the field of linguistics benefits from researchers from both sides working together and taking each other’s research seriously.
Universal Grammar, recursion, and Pirahã
In the last section, we learned that Universal Grammar is the language-specific genetic component of the human language ability. In the last few decades, Chomsky begun arguing that, from an evolutionary perspective, it would make sense if this language-specific genetic component only consists of a single mutation that provided an immediate advantage to the human species.
In 2002, Chomsky published a paper with two evolutionary biologists named Marc Hauser[1] and Tecumseh Fitch, in which they argue that this single component is the capacity for recursion. Recursion is a property of grammar that allows us to iteratively apply a rule to its own output. This is what allows us to put possessives inside of other possessives, or prepositional phrases inside of other prepositional phrases, like the examples that illustrated the infinity of language from last section. We will learn more about recursion in Chapter 16.
A few years later, in 2005, a fieldworker named Daniel Everett published a paper claiming that the language he was working on did not have recursion. The language’s name was Pirahã and it is spoken by a tribe in the Amazon rainforest that is still relatively isolated. Some researchers took Everett’s claims as evidence that UG does not exist and that Chomsky is wrong. Many others, though, were not convinced.
Generative grammarians have criticized many elements of Everett’s work. Some have looked through previous work on Pirahã by Everett himself and found data that they think contradicts his 2005 paper. Others have pointed out that Chomsky never claimed that all languages must have recursion, simply that recursion is a human capability. The Pirahã people are still able to learn Brazilian Portuguese, which definitely has recursion, which means that the Pirahã people are capable of recursion even if they don’t use it. Similarly, others have pointed out that there are lots of different kinds of recursion, but not all languages use all of them. For example, German allows recursive noun-noun compounds but other languages do not (see Chapter 10). Still others have pointed out that Everett’s work is problematic because it primitivizes and exocticizes the Pirahã people and their culture.
Everett’s work and the Pirahã people still get attention in popular linguistics books and blogs and on mainstream media. The impact on research, on the other hand, was not so large. Because the Pirahã people are so isolated, it is difficult to independently test Everett’s claims. After a few years debating the merits and weaknesses of Everett’s work, many linguists have moved on to other things.
Check yourself!
References and further resources
For linguistics students
Hornstein, Norbert. 2015. My (HOPEFULLY) last ever post on Vyvyan Evans and his endless dodging of the central issues. Faculty of Language. http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.com/2015/05/my-hopefully-last-ever-post-on-vyvyan.html
Evans, Vyvyan. 2015. The structure of scientific revolutions: Reflections on radical fundamentalism in language science. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/language-in-the-mind/201504/the-structure-scientific-revolutions
Academic sources
Hauser, Marc, Noam Chomsky, and Tecumseh Fitch. 2002. The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science, 298 (5598), 1569–1579.
Everett, Daniel. 2005. Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language. Current Anthropology 46(4): 621–646.
Nevins, Andrew, David Pesetsky, & Cilene Rodrigues. 2009. Pirahã exceptionality: A reassessment. Language 85(2): 355–404.
- In 2010, Marc Hauser was found guilty of falsifying data and scientific misconduct. However, the paper mentioned here is still cited and used, likely due to the prestige of the other two authors. ↵
Chomsky's theory that there is an innate, language-specific genetic component underlying the human capacity for language.
The method of inquiry used in science whereby researchers observe data, and then formulate, test, and revise hypotheses based on their observations.
Any theories or models that are based on the work of Noam Chomsky.
A research program/framework in generative syntax, beginning in the 1990s and continuing through the present day, with the goal of modeling a maximally efficient computational system to account for the attested syntactic patterns of the languages of the world.
Iteratively applying a rule to its own output.
A word with two or more roots.
