It's clear that language is a human thing.
But how has language come about? What do languages have in common?
Here are some ideas:
the language of thought hypothesis
learning theory: the poverty of the stimulus
paulo freire and the tabula rasa
The most dominant theory comes from Chomsky:
theories of language learning and teaching: behaviourism vs nativism
chomsky and language acquisition
what makes us human: noam chomsky and human languages
behaviourism >>> krashen... pinker... skinner... chomsky
As Wikipedia summarises:
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be. When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG.[1] The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established.
And the theory is indeed being debated.
This month, the British Academy Neil and Saras Smith Medal has just been awarded to Professor Nicholas Evans for his long and distinguished career working on endangered languages, both documenting hitherto undescribed languages and exploring the consequences of such data for general linguistic theory.
This is the linguist they can’t shut up:
Nicholas Evans was wading out to a boat moored in the shallow Gulf of Carpentaria, off the northern coast of Australia, when he felt what he thought was a baby shark nipping at his heels. The “nips” were actually bullets hitting the sea on either side of him. They had exited a rifle wielded by a hungover pilot called Fletcher...And this is his book, courtesy of the New European/World:
This is quite revolutionary when it comes to understanding human language, because, through a lifetime of deep listening, Nicholas Evans has reshaped the global study of languages:
Evans’ work has made a significant impact beyond academia – interpreting for Native Title cases and cultural heritage documentation, developing writing systems for previously unwritten languages, and helping revitalise endangered languages.
Evans is currently teaching in Garrthalala, Northeastern Arnhem Land at a new ‘bush uni’ initiative aimed at bridging the path to university studies for Yolŋu Matha-speaking students. He will return to Canberra next month to continue exploring how languages shape – and are shaped – by the ways humans think, feel, and imagine.
It’s a reminder that every language reveals a unique act of human imagination, and a testament to a lifetime spent listening deeply to the many voices of our world.
Interestingly, Chomsky was the first to receive the British Academy prize - as reported by the Observer this weekend on Cracking the code of Papua New Guinea’s undocumented languages:
The first winner of that medal, in 2014, was Noam Chomsky. Chomsky famously emphasised the commonalities across languages, the universal template or grammar that a baby is born with, that allows it to pick up any natural language with minimal prompting.
Evans thinks the Chomskyans are looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and that what defines language is its staggering diversity – the vast span of “engineering solutions” that evolution has found to the problem of human communication.
A language must allow a person to express any idea to another person, but it also has to be learnable by babies. These two constraints drive language evolution, but what nobody yet knows is where the limits of the possible lie. How big is the language design space? Or, to put it another way, how complex or expressive of the minutiae of human experience can a language become, before it becomes unlearnable?
The reason nobody knows this is because it is thought that only about 10% of the estimated 7,000 living languages are well documented. Since 90% of those languages are also endangered, with many of the unwritten ones being at the greatest risk of extinction, Evans has long argued for the need to record them.
The linguists who take on that painstaking task are constantly reminded of the ocean of diversity on whose shore they stand. “Almost every new language that comes under the microscope reveals unanticipated new features,” Evans and fellow linguist Stephen Levinson, then director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, wrote in a landmark 2009 paper questioning the mainstream Chomskyan view.
There is another reason why Evans considers documentation so vital. Language infuses everything we do, so studying it is, he says, “mainlining into the human experience” – past and present.
This is the research by Nicholas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson from 2009: With diversity in mind: Freeing the language sciences from Universal Grammar | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core
The Evans-Levinson work is quite fundamental to what makes us human:
Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills.
Others have followed this up, looking at the myth of language universals and the myth of universal grammar:
It has been widely argued that an innate Universal Grammar (UG) must be postulated to explain two key observations: first, that languages share putatively “universal” patterns, which appear arbitrary from a functional, communicative point of view; and second, that children acquire language so readily from an apparently impoverished linguistic input (the “poverty of the stimulus” argument). The second point has been the subject of considerable recent interest, with many theorists arguing that linguistic input is richer than has previously been suspected (e.g., Pullum & Scholz 2002; Reali & Christiansen 2005) or that modern learning methods are richer than is often presumed (e.g., Chater & Vita´nyi 2007; Harman & Kulkarni 2007). The first argument, based on language universals, has gone relatively unchallenged in the cognitive science literature– but no longer. Evans & Levinson (E&L) provide powerful evidence that language universals are myth rather than reality, and hence, that this line of defense of UG is swept aside. It remains to be explained, though, how languages came to display such stunning diversity, and this is where research on language evolution may offer some insight.
Finally, another [Vyvyan] Evans has written a more accessible book challenging The Language Myth - but it was really not liked by the academic establishment:
In 2016, Language, the flagship academic journal of the Linguistic Society of America published a series of "Alternative (Re)views"[12] by six leading linguists, all addressing The Language Myth. Evans was originally invited to contribute a response to those articles. However, his submission was rejected by the journal's review editor.[13] Evans wrote an open-letter to the linguistics community claiming that he was being censored.[14].
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