Is language innate to humans? Are we born “pre-wired” to spontaneously speak whichever language we hear in the first months of our lives? That is, are our brains equipped — at least metaphorically — with some sort of language organ, the hardware on which the software of our parents’ and tribe’s language runs? Noam Chomsky, who introduced the notion of pre-wiring in 1957, claims that a Martian linguist would consider all 6,000 of Earth’s languages to be variations on a single “universal grammar.” Deep down, says Chomsky, all languages work the same because we come into the world with a similar capacity for language built into our genes. (See “Noam Chomsky: Copernicus of Linguistics,” July 30, 2009.)
Or is language a human invention? Is it like stone axes or huts? “The discovery that humans are better at building human houses than porpoises tells us nothing about whether the architecture of human houses is innate,” wrote Dan Everett, who leads the charge against Chomsky’s thesis.
Everett, a loyal Chomskyite until 2000, is an unlikely antagonist. He went as a missionary to live with the Pirahã, a tribe of 300 or so hunter-gatherers in the Brazilian rainforest on the Maici River. His original intention in 1977 was to convert them to Christianity but they had no interest in being “saved.” Years of observing their joy-filled, live-for-the-day attitude converted him to atheism. Meanwhile, he struggled to learn their esoteric language (three vowels, eight consonants, present tense only, no number or color words and 65,000 possible verb forms). Today he is probably the only outsider fluent in Pirahã.
Everett claims that the Pirahã language lacks recursion, a trait that Chomsky maintained, in a paper he co-wrote for Science in 2002, is “the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language.” Recursion is what we do when we embed one thought inside another using subordinate or relative clauses like Russian nesting dolls. “I saw the guy you said wore the same hat you bought from the shop we went to yesterday next to the market where …”. Recursion implies that there’s no limit to the potential length of a sentence.
Because the tribe’s worldview is limited, so is the syntax of their language, in Everett’s view. Anything outside the members’ immediate experience — i.e. that they haven’t either seen for themselves or heard from an eyewitness — is simply not worth discussing, thus limiting their range of conversation topics, thereby eliminating the need for recursion; their sentences have finite length. To use Everett’s example, you can’t say “John’s brother’s house” in Pirahã. Instead, you say (sentence one) “John has a brother,” and, (sentence two) “this brother has a house.” If true, it threatens not only Chomsky’s claim that every language has recursion, but the entire edifice of universal grammar.
Sound arcane? This is the stuff and substance of the high-octane language wars that have raged for decades. Chomsky is on record calling his erstwhile acolyte a charlatan — essentially accusing Everett of faking his data. (Read Everett’s stranger-than-fiction book Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes to judge for yourself.) If you harbor a romantic view of science as a rational, fact-driven process in which human emotions are secondary to the nobler ideals of Truth and Integrity, check out the Chomsky versus Everett saga. Possibly as a result of Everett’s Pirahã challenge, Chomsky modified his bedrock requirement for “recursion,” diluting it somewhat and renaming it “merge.”
The recursion/merge debate and Chomsky’s hypothesis of universal grammar are muddier than ever. Or maybe it’s fading from relevance as a new generation of linguists accepts that language acquisition is possible without genetic grammar capacity. In the words of Ted Gibson, professor of both cognitive sciences and linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “It’s crazy to say [universal grammar] is dead. It was never alive.”
Barry Evans (barryevans9@yahoo.com) is still looking for his brain’s language organ.
This article appears in The Last Days of the Budget Motel.
No, merge works recursively. Merge is just a computational operation whereby two syntactic units are combined together to form another syntactic object (for example, “the cat was killed” and “when it was hit by a car” produce, when operated upon by merge, the sentence “the cat was killed when it was hit by a car”). Merge is recursive because it is an operation that can be applied to its own output (in the last example, the inputs were “the cat was killed” and “when it was hit by a car”, the computational operation was merge and the output was “the cat was killed when it was hit by a car”; via the application of the same merge operation, this output can then be combined with yet another syntactic unit, like “that was traveling at sixty kilometers an hour” for example, to form another linguistic unit: “the cat was killed when it was hit by a car that was traveling at sixty kilometers an hour”). So merge works just like any recursive function does in the theory of computation, which is why merge has the property of recursion. There’s no “downgrade” from recursion to merge, you just didn’t understand the theory.
Moreover, Everett’s argument is fallacious in the most vulgar sort of way. Chomsky’s claim is roughly the following: (1) if humans acquire recursive languages, then humans must have a genetic capacity that allows them to mentally process recursive languages. Anyone who knows their logic is aware of the fact that this conditional does not imply the following proposition: (2) if humans have a genetic capacity that allows them to mentally process recursive languages, then humans must acquire recursive languages. That is, in general, “if A then B” does not imply “if B then A”. In finding an example of a human language that does not feature recursion, all Everett has done is to disprove proposition (2), but this proposition is not implied by Chomsky’s actual claim, and so Everett’s (very much disputed, if not refuted) discovery is irrelevant as far as the viability of Chomsky’s program is concerned.
As for a younger generation of linguists abandoning ideas of innate grammar, well that might be partially true. At the same time, there are academics trying to argue that there are no such things as genetic programs, and that all talk of information being encoded in DNA is meaningless. In both cases, this doesn’t represent the majority view, which is fortunate because in both cases it simply demonstrates a shocking lack of understanding of theory of computation. As far as I can tell, dissent from this basic view of Chomsky’s amounts to an infantile and misdirected fear of genetic determinism (of course, many people, like Pinker for example, dissent from Chomsky in the finer details, and that’s where the media coverage should be concentrated; at the moment, what the media is doing is analogous to claiming that the general theory of relativity has been disproved instead of focusing coverage on the more subtle disputes–the ones of actual importance to physicists–that exist between scientists who accept general relativity).
Dan Everett deals with the merge/recursion confusion–also whether a single counter-example of a language lacking recursion voids a language gene–in this very readable discussion:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002…
BTW, he’s had to put up with a lot worse than “infantile and misdirected” over the years!
Recent interview with Noam Chomsky included this:
How do you account for your amazing stamina and energy level at age 87?
The bicycle theory. As long as you keep riding, you dont fall.