Teacher Discussion Forums

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According to my graduate school, this topic doesn't even belong in this forum because "it isn't Applied Linguistics" ( I wanted to do my Masters thesis on the subject, but it was turned down).

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The point, which Iain, Larry and I have vaguely discussed elsewhere, is where does language, as a specifically human activity, come from?

It seems to me that we can't have an explanatory grammar (Chomsky's term) of English, or any other language, unless we have a coherent theory of the origins of language. Until we know, or think we know, what language is, we can't claim that our rules are rules, that competence is distinct from performance (Chomsky again), that much of the grammar that we force-feed our students has any basis in fact.

There are two main camps within linguistic theory - those that believe that language is a specific set of skills and capabilities that is different from (to/than) other skills and capabilities (Chomsky, but not only), and those that believe that the skills and capabilities we use when using language are the same skills and capabilities we use when dealing with myriads of other situations.

Chomsky believes (believed?) that language is different - the way we learn our native language is somehow genetically programmed in our brains; there are specific brain functions (not localised - because no-one's found them - but there) which deal with language (specifically syntax) and nothing else. Language is an innate part of the human genetic make-up.

The opposing view believes that, as children, we use the same skills and capabilities to learn language that we use to learn everything else - that language is not special, and certainly not innate. This view poses the question, "If we can't 'explain' language as being a specific part of the human genetic make-up, how can we explain it?"

There's plenty more I could say, but I don't want to make this (another one of my) rants, so I'll simply ask for gut reactions at the moment. Are we, as humans, genetically programmed to learn language or not?

This is a huge question, szwagier, and probably way beyond the ability of most of us here on this forum. It is certainly beyond me. We here are, for the most part anyway, teachers of English. That is a tiny specialty of the general issue you raise. Nonetheless, it remains a fair question, and one that we language teachers should not simply brush off, thinking that it's no business of ours. I have greater respect for teachers who are not afraid to tackle some of the basic theoretical issues which form the foundation of their field, than for those for whom theory has no practical application and therefore have no interest in it. Without wishing to be held strictly to the letter of this, I believe in general that the more you know about your field, the better teacher you will be.

I tend to lean towards the "language is innate" end of the arguement. There is much research to support that claim, and some very heavyweight thinkers seem to endorse it too. Not only Chomsky, who is no slouch, but also Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett (Director of the Center for Cognative Studies at Tufts University), for starters. Here's what Dennett has to say, in part, in Consciousness Explained (1991), p.190:

"The astonishing hominid brain growth [of early Homo sapiens, who lived from roughly 150,000 years ago to about 10,000 years ago] was essentially complete before the development of language, and so cannot be a response to the complexities of mind that language has made possible. The innate specializations for language, hypothesized by the linguist Noam Chomsky and others, and now beginning to be confirmed in details of neuroanatomy, are a very recent and rushed add-on, no doubt an exploitation of earlier sequencing circuitry (William Calvin, 1989a) accelerated by the Baldwin Effect."

The Baldwin Effect has to do with the evolutionary advantages of brain plasticity, making possible a vast acceleration of the evolutionary development of certain learnable Good Tricks (Dennett's term to describe skills which enable survival advantage). What is relevant to this thread is his assertion that Chomsky's postulation is being confirmed in the details of neuroanatomy. (His book was written 12 years ago, and I suspect that further research during the ensuing decade has either more deeply confirmed Chomsky's ideas, or discredited them -- I don't know which). The brain is, of course, astonishingly complex, and may not have any central place from which language springs. A great deal of 'parallel processing' takes place in that fantastic organ, and language is very likely the result of a series of separate but related processes in different brain areas resulting from dozens of stimuli.

Anyway, while I am hardly qualified to suggest anything here besides a gut feel, my impression holds for hard wiring in our brains at birth that aids our childhood language development. Pinker does a masterful job of describing it in The Language Instinct, and, along the way, of debunking the notion that language learning skills are just a specific application of general learning skills.

For what it's worth!

Larry Latham

I must confess this topic exceeds me somewhat although I am well into linguistics. As Larry said so well, it seems safer to accept language as an innate faculty of humans.
I am currently reading Whitney's THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE, which is a concise introduction to the various specialties that are trying to shed light on this issue. There is a biological aspect, a societal one, and a psychological one to consider. For example from a biological point of view, humans are the only species with a language; of course, all depends on the accepted definition of "language". The author tried to answer this by saying only humans can generate sentences with an increasing complexity, adding defining elements to a normal subject-predicate sentence. By embedding extra information, a procedure he calls "recursion", humans produce language distinct from the communication patterns typical chimpanzees
Animals, he says, do not have "language skills" but "communication skills". He argues that animals may be trained to imitate sounds and obey simple instructions within narrowly defined circumstances, but they do not pass these skills on to their own kind. They do utter certain kinds of information, but again, these communciative activities occur within very tight aned vital realms of daily life.

Here's some of my usual wild musing.

szwagier wrote:The opposing view believes that, as children, we use the same skills and capabilities to learn language that we use to learn everything else - that language is not special, and certainly not innate. This view poses the question, "If we can't 'explain' language as being a specific part of the human genetic make-up, how can we explain it?"

If I'm precise, Chomsky isn't saying that language is innate, he's suggesting that our ability to learn language is innate. He theorises that part of our brain, called the Langauage Acquisation Device, allows us to make sense of certain sounds, associate meaning (behaviour - sounds matching) and use this information to reproduce / manipulate the sounds to produce a desired effect.

We know that the sounds we chose are arbitrary, "man" and "hombre" have the same meaning but different sounds. Each generation teaches the next what the arbitrary sound - meanings combinations are by offering rewards. For example, when a child says it's first correct sound pattern (i.e word) the parents produce excited high-pitched whoops and yips. They also pay the child more attention for a time, and importantly, later they stop rewarding the child with attention.

What we can establish is

1) humans can produce sounds (via the lips, mouth, tongue, larynx, and lungs) - this isn't unique to humans
2) humans can pattern match behaviours and sounds (a meeow, and a hiss have different associated behaviours)
3) humans can manipulate sounds to change meaning (man and men only have one phoneme difference but represent different (but closely related) concepts. Man and pan have one phoneme difference, sufficient to completely change the underlying concept. As far as I'm aware no animal has the producivity ability that humans have.

Ignoring the biological limitation of other species to produce human sounds, the lack of productivity (the ability to manipulate new words / sounds to produce new meanings) explains why chimpanzees have a small vocabulary vastly smaller than a humans.

Evolution provided homo sapiens with a greater range of possible sounds. We know that humans only recognise a subset of the possible sounds we are capable of producing. (What we don't need gets ignored, c.f. phones versus allophones). Which leads us to suspect that language could be much more complex than it is. Perhaps, with only a slight increase in sophisication homo sapiens began to manipulate words / sounds to affect meaning. Chimpanzees with a lot of help from scientists have learned English up to the level of a two year old (i.e. two word combinations). Perhaps, after 50,000 years of further evolution they'll start splitting infinitives?

Iain