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[adventious]

"Turn taking" is a simple enough concept, but I've been intrigued by it as a topic (pragmatics) my entire career. It's baked into so much of what we do (psycholinguistics) it can go unaudited and unexploited. This article was relevant to me because I currently teach in a culture that places a high value on recitation (China) while much of my method is a communicative task structured by turn-taking-- from phonemic awareness to phrasal declarations, interrogatives, or imperatives. This article (and the links and references in it) challenged my thinking about formal and functional theories of grammar.

Poeppel's "Parts List" for Language, and Why There's More to It Than Syntax
--Sean Roberts

Poeppel has shown in a series of experiments that there are acoustic regularities across languages, and brain oscillations track at least two levels of spoken language structure: syllables and higher-level “phrases”. Since syllables are widely held to be universally common in human languages, this is a good candidate for the parts list. Poeppel’s most recent work was covered, misleadingly, in some places as “Chomsky was right” and this is evidence for universal grammar in the brain, which Poeppel does not claim. He called for more “muscular” linguists to step up and propose a “parts list” of [syntactic] linguistic primitives that neuro researchers could try and detect in the brain.

Which brings us to Hornstein’s contribution to the lectures. He gave a presentation on a kind of “guide to linguistics for neuroscientists”. He literally started his presentation with a slide saying that “Chomsky is always right”, and went on to provide a “parts list” drawn form Generativist theory, which he claimed was completely uncontroversial.

To be fair, I agree with what Hornstein has expressed in other places, that generative linguists have a good notion of the kinds of syntactic patterns that exist in the world’s languages, and these patterns deserve an explanation (and are often ignored by evolutionary linguists outside of the generative program). But a lot of the argument was a mix of a kind of argument from authority (experts in grammar think that studying anything else is not worthwhile) and a “no true Scotsman” argument (all linguists agree on this, so if you don’t agree, you’re not a real linguist).

One topic that I’ve been learning about recently is the rules of conversation as studied through conversation analysis. While this is often a qualitative field, and certainly outside the mainstream of linguistics, it works rigorously from real data to try to capture how conversation works. It’s possible to draw up a “parts list” for conversation, which would include things like taking turns at talking and sequential organisation (certain pragmatic actions are complemented by others, like questions followed by answers). A paper by Stephen Levinson published last month (pdf here) spells out how turn taking has implications for language processing and acquisition, and can be studied through methods from psycholinguistics, cognitive science, neuroimaging, cross-cultural comparison and cross-species comparison (other species take turns!).

This wide range of approaches has recently been showcased in a special issue on turn taking. Indeed, one suggestion is that the regularity of turn taking could be supported by brain oscillations in a similar way to Poeppel’s suggestion for syllables. This parts list also has implications for theories of language evolution, which we’ll discuss in our workshop Language adapts to Interaction.

I’ve also been thinking about what “parts” could be added to the list from the field of cultural evolution. There are plenty of ideas for concepts that are essential to the transmission and maintenance of culture (e.g. Replicator/Interactor/Selection), but not all make predictions about neural mechanisms. One approach that might help here is to ask why humans use language. The role of language in maintaining social relationships and links with social cognition may provide clues for how the fields of cultural evolution and neuroscience can talk to each other. Then there are other aspects connected to acquisition and teaching, such as gaze following and pointing.

Anyway, here’s my message for neuroscientists: There’s more to language than syntax.

http://www.replicatedtypo.com/
A Replicated Typo was originally your standard wordpress blog dedicated to the non-standard theme of evolutionary linguistics. Its original author, James Winters, recently (July 2010) decided to buy his own host, get a decent domain and expand his list of contributors. Those currently writing for the blog include Sean Roberts, Hannah Little, Michael Pleyer, Anne Pritchard, Richard Littauer and Bill Benzon.

[fluffyhamster]

Well, anyone who claims "Chomsky is always right" would probably struggle to (communicatively) teach a language. Students can't sit there silently at the great lecturer's feet for 60 or 70 years awaiting dribs and drabs of "relevant" research and seriously hope to learn how to actually speak. What little Generative "linguistics applied" (i.e. AL) I've seen has been a joke, very thin indeed. It starts to make stuff like Headway look good. And general findings from CA and pragmatics can in comparison obviously find more of an immediate application in LT, especially as they aren't too bogged down by grand theories but rather go more or less straight for (the) data first.

[adventious]

Hornstein replies
Feb 7, 2016

[fluffyhamster]

TBH I'm not that interested in reading further about "provocations" from a generative neurolinguist, or indeed even in the attending functionalist's or pragmatist's reactions to those (on my behalf, as it were). I'd be more interested in how "the article (and the links and references in it) challenged your thinking about formal and functional theories of grammar". What did you find challenging? The generative laundry lists?