Okay, first off. I don’t know how familiar people are with the concept of Universal Grammar, but I’ll try to boil it down and give you a straightforward version. UG is composed of all things that are common to all human languages. This is not confined to spoken languages (ie, it includes sign language, which interestingly does seem to share many features with spoken language) but makes no attempts to explain orthography.
Now, here’s my point. If we’ve got UG, and we assume that there are certain features shared between languages that are selected for depending on the environment and the sociopolitical landscape (as some linguists have done, notably Oudeyer and Kaplan), UG probably won’t consist of a series of features, per se, since (by definition) those features will vary depending on where you are in the world. To assume otherwise would be rather like assuming that all organisms must consist of certain genes in order to be organisms.
What UG would consist of is rather what all those various linguistic features have in common, not just those things shared by successful features. If the linguistic features are genes, UG would therefore be analogous to the base pairs that compose all DNA.
One reply on “Universal Grammar and Linguistic Evolution”
Would you think UG, perhaps coupled with other cognitive systems, may also be analogous to the physical/chemical laws that restrain biology (ie its possible ‘design space’)?
Oooh, before I forget: one really cool thing about UG and syntax and all that — we had to read+present this paper in LING300:
http://www.psych.yorku.ca/gigi/documents/Grodzinsky_2000.pdf
Basically it talks about neurology of Broca’s Affasia, and points out the very element of grammar that gets messed up in those patients — the so-called ‘tense node’ of the sentence, which in English governs the tense (auxiliary) and the verb phrase. Basically, those patients cannot perform ‘movement’ (of words) beyond the tense node. Take for example a simple sentence:
“Who are you?”
The underlying form of that sentence is actually:
“You are who?”
But English grammar requires that ‘who’ to move outside, to the left. So you get:
Who are you
arewhoto put very crudely, and ignore the actual syntactic structure.*A Broca’s Aphasiac would have problems with that, and utter something like “You are who?” (well, there’s other difficulties but for the sake of simplicity…)
*Unless you guys are dying to hear about X-bar Theory… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar I’d rather Peter explain that one =P
Why this paper is so full of awesome is that for a long time, Broca’s Affasia was studied by neurologists and psychologists who could care less about how language actually works. To them, the problem was simple — the patient sucked at grammar. And linguists generally didn’t work with stroke patients, and prefered to play around with super-abstract Chomskyan stuff instead. So it took until the late 90’s/early 00’s for the two fields to come together and begin to find actual physical embodied biological basis for all these super-complicated syntactic tree abstractions and what-not. All term (and in LING201 as well) I was sitting there wondering: “Is this stuff actually real in a physical sense, or did they they make it up to develop shiny complicated theories?”. Especially the whole movement thing above: it seriously looked like they were just trying to patch up holes in their syntactic theories by allowing this “oh, words can move” flexibility. BUT IT IS REAL! It has neurological basis! There is a specific region of the brain involved with this process!
That feeling was simply euphoric at the time…
Hopefully this integration will continue, and my hunch is that MANY of the long-awaited breakthroughs in cognitive science will happen in exactly that way — integrating natural sciences and the humanities, at long last…! (really excited!)
I really recommend the Grodzinsky 2001 paper if you’re interested in this kind of stuff though. It’s a really nice paper, featuring a very thorough analysis involving both competence (~comprehension) and performance (~speaking), and a comparison of Broca’s aphasia symptoms in a wide variety of languages. Fascinating stuff!