The Biology of the Language Faculty: Its Perfection, Past and Future by Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky, around whose work much of the Syntax series revolves, gives listeners a glimpse into the evolution of his own thinking, with an emphasis on areas of linguistics where computational considerations play a major role.

Chomsky briefly outlines the key components of a biologically based linguistics that began to emerge 50 years ago: first, a genetic language endowment (Universal Grammar), which interacts with the external environment, and second, the individual’s development and learning strategies. While UG has been called “controversial,” says Chomsky, the “alternative is magic,” since something has to account for the fact that “my granddaughter picked out part of her environment as language related, and almost reflexively developed a language while her pet kitten, a chimp or songbird, exposed to exactly the same data, didn’t take the first step and couldn’t conceivably take the second.”

Chomsky links a third factor of language involving architecture and the principles underlying data acquisition to natural laws that may apply generally in biology, and not specifically to language. Research suggests that between 50 and 100 thousand years ago, humans made an abrupt evolutionary leap forward in cognitive capacity. Language seems to have emerged at this time. While long-term evolution can lead to great complexity, a sudden leap like this, says Chomsky, tends to yield something “simple, almost perfect -- a perfect solution to design problems imposed by circumstances and conditions prevailing at the time of emergence...” This proposal has been dubbed the Strong Minimalist Theory (SMT), and offers a plausible approach to studying the complexity of language, believes Chomsky. It might prove profitable to “examine the range of phenomena that fall under what’s loosely called language,” and try to “disentangle them so some parts of them conform more or less to SMT.” And here, says Chomsky, issues of computational efficiency play perhaps an overwhelming role.

Chomsky links SMT to transformational grammar, a long-standing component of his linguistic theory. He states that “a simple form of transformational grammar is just the optimal system, and if you don’t have it, you’d have to have an argument as to why you don’t.” Well-designed systems should have simple, sensible properties. He recommends “chipping away at the stipulated properties of Universal Grammar, and technologies proposed to deal with particular problems to see how closely you can show that language does approximate to the perfect design that would be a natural expectation in light of what appears to be evolutionary history.”

The Biology of the Language Faculty: Its Perfection, Past and Future by Noam Chomsky (1/4) from Joe Zavala on Vimeo.

The Biology of the Language Faculty: Its Perfection, Past and Future by Noam Chomsky (2/4) from Joe Zavala on Vimeo.

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The Anatomy of Biolinguistic Minimalism

Samuel David Epstein & T. Daniel Seely

URL: http://elearning.emich.edu/media/Producer/LING/SeelyEpstein.html

Most of this talk is an exposition (hopefully accurate) of Chomsky’s own ideas, with a few of our own hypotheses thrown in. Our goal is to attempt to clarify some of the leading ideas of Chomsky’s biolinguistic minimalism, especially those which, even as full time practitioners we have found challenging (at least for us!). We hope that the video clarifies certain issues and what we believe may be misunderstandings of Chomsky’s framework and goals, including our own misunderstandings, which the making of this video helped us to clarify. We hope that our attempted clarification here will help contribute to continued biolinguistic inquiry and to continued interdisciplinary work that this framework has already generated. Certainly, none of the issues here are self-evident or simple. We have struggled to understand certain concepts, and hope we do Chomsky’s theory justice here, in our attempt to convey the excitement that Chomsky’s generative linguistic inquiry and biolinguistic minimalism has engendered. We have tried to be as non-technical as possible, focusing on certain of the foundational issues and current developments of the biolinguistic framework of inquiry.

Key questions we’ll address include:

• What is the object of inquiry in biolinguistic minimalism; and what role do idealization and abstraction play in the formation of this (and other) theories?

• What are the particular idealizations proposed?

• What methods could be used in exploring this object?

• In what sense are the methods “scientific” and in what sense is the inquiry “biological” — more specifically, can anatomy and physiology be concepts pertinent to cognitive science in general, and to linguistics construed as a cognitive science in particular?

• If so what explanatory benefits might this provide?

Biolinguistics construes the human language faculty as a ‘mental organ’ and so we discuss the role of “organology” in biology and biolinguistics. We then discuss methodological considerations. Here we seek to distinguish Organs vs. Behaviors vs. Capacities. The roles of Anatomy and Physiology, as well as the difference between perception and cognition, are also examined. The so-called Mind–Body problem is, again following Chomsky, argued not to be a problem unless one requires that all theoretical postulates be material tangible objects (which would exclude all of science). The theory-driven creativity of experimental laboratory science versus “indiscriminate data collection” is discussed along with the distinction between data on the one hand and evidence (for or against a specific theory) on the other. The nature of the various kinds of evidence currently used in Linguistics, including introspection as well as psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic laboratory methods, is then discussed.

Finally we turn to Minimalism, having hoped to have clarified the term “biolinguistic.” We discuss two kinds of Minimalism, methodological and substantive. The first is a pervasive consideration in scientific explanation under which simplicity of explanation, like empirical coverage, is regarded as vitally important. We hope to illustrate substantive Minimalism with a very simple (we hope tractable) Minimalist syntactic analysis — which itself revisits the roles of organology, anatomy, and physiology within biolinguistic minimalism.

Samuel David Epstein University of Michigan Department of Linguistics 440 Lorch Hall 611 Tappan Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA sepstein@umich.edu

T. Daniel Seely Eastern Michigan University Department of English Language & Literature Program in Linguistics 612D Pray-Harrold Ypsilanti, MI 48197 USA tseely@emich.edu

The Anatomy of Chomsky's Biolinguistic Minimalism: A tutorial by Epstein and Seely (1/6) from Joe Zavala on Vimeo.

The Anatomy of Chomsky's Biolinguistic Minimalism: A tutorial by Epstein and Seely (2/6) from Joe Zavala on Vimeo.

The Anatomy of Chomsky's Biolinguistic Minimalism: A tutorial by Epstein and Seely (3/6) from Joe Zavala on Vimeo.

The Anatomy of Chomsky's Biolinguistic Minimalism: A tutorial by Epstein and Seely (4/6) from Joe Zavala on Vimeo.

The Anatomy of Chomsky's Biolinguistic Minimalism: A tutorial by Epstein and Seely (5/6) from Joe Zavala on Vimeo.

The Anatomy of Chomsky's Biolinguistic Minimalism: A tutorial by Epstein and Seely (6/6) from Joe Zavala on Vimeo.

Linguists doubt exception to universal grammar

Robin H. Ray, News Office Correspondent April 23, 2007

Controversies in the field of linguistics seldom make headlines, which is why the current imbroglio over an alleged counterexample to Universal Grammar (UG), made famous in the 1960s by Noam Chomsky, MIT professor of linguistics, is so unusual.

On one side is Daniel L. Everett, a linguist at Illinois State University, who has spent several decades studying Pirahã, a language spoken by roughly 350 indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rainforest. On the other are a number of linguists, including MIT linguistics professor David Pesetsky, who have thrown doubt upon many of Everett's claims, both cultural and linguistic, about the Pirahã.

In a telephone interview, Pesetsky said, "What we tried to do in our response was to highlight the ways in which we are trying to unravel the system that unites all the languages in the world," including Pirahã. The attributes that Everett claims are unique to that language are in fact extant in other well-documented languages, such as Bengali and even German.

Linguistics began to focus attention on UG several decades ago in an attempt to move their study from the particularization of philology--the detailed description of individual languages and language families, with which the field was preoccupied for centuries--to an understanding of the remarkable wealth of features that all languages share, and thence to an understanding of the human mind.

The current contretemps began with Everett's 2005 paper in Cultural Anthropology, "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language," which described a number of "gaps" in Pirahã morphosyntax (the relationships between words and how their elements convey meaning).

As a culture, says Everett, Pirahã speakers lack any sense of the past beyond what living individuals have personally experienced, and they have no creation myths or fiction, no sense of numbers or counting, and no art. Constraints of culture, Everett believes, in turn impoverish the language, which has no tenses, no names for colors and other allegedly unique paucities.

The language constraints, he claims, indicate "some of the components of so-called core grammar are subject to cultural constraints, something that is predicted not to occur" by Chomsky's universal-grammar model.

Everett's article and his colorful field career have been taken up by the popular press, with stories in the Independent, Der Spiegel and, most recently, the New Yorker, among other publications.

His critics--Pesetsky, Andrew Nevins of Harvard and Cilene Rodrigues of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil--fired back in March of this year with a paper entitled "Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment," taking issue with virtually every claim to Pirahã's uniqueness that Everett advanced. Everett hastily answered (also in March), with "Cultural Constraints on Grammar in Pirahã: A Reply to Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues (2007)." (Those two papers may be viewed at the LingBuzz linguistics archive site,

ling.auf.net/lingbuzz, where they head the "Top Recent Downloads" list.)

Pesetsky marvels at the interest this debate has sparked, not only within the field but in the world at large. As of April 12, he noted in an e-mail, "Our paper has been downloaded 1,300 times and (Everett's) reply has been downloaded 910 times--astonishing figures for the site and for a field like linguistics."

While linguists at MIT pay a lot of attention to theoretical questions, such as the universal properties of sound systems, speech perception and speech production, field linguistics is far from moribund here. Linguistics grad student Seth Cable is heading off soon to Alaska on an National Science Foundation dissertation grant, to study the syntax and semantics of questions in Tlingit, a language spoken by an indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest. And one of the great figures in field linguistics, the late Kenneth Hale, was an esteemed member of the MIT faculty until his retirement in 1999; in his long career, he worked on languages as diverse as Hopi, Tohono O'odham (of the Sonoran desert region) and Warlpiri. His fluency in the latter, an indigenous language of Australia, was such that he was able to keep his sons, Ezra and Caleb, fluent in the language even after they had moved back to the United States. "He was a linguist's linguist," as Pesetsky put it

Fuente:http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/pesetsky-ling.html