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  • Language, mind and brain: Some psychological and neurological constraints on theories of grammarby Ewa Dabrowska
  • Holger Diessel
Language, mind and brain: Some psychological and neurological constraints on theories of grammar. By Ewa Dabrowska. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004. Pp. 262. ISBN 1589010477. $29.95.

Language is grounded in the human mind/brain, and linguists agree that language, notably grammar, is to a large extent the way it is because of cognitive and neurological constraints that underlie the use and structure of language. The nature of these constraints, however, is controversial. Following Noam Chomsky, many linguists assume that children are endowed with an innate universal grammar consisting of principles and categories that are exclusively needed for language.

Ewa Dabrowska’s fascinating book, Language, mind and brain, shows that there are alternative ways of looking at the cognitive and neurological foundations of language. The human mind/brain constrains language, notably grammar, not through innate linguistic principles and categories, but through more general cognitive mechanisms that are not needed only for language. Drawing on studies from various subfields of cognitive science, D argues that there is no compelling evidence for linguistic innateness, genetically specified modularity, and language maturation. It is the purpose of this book to inform the reader about alternative ways of looking at the cognitive and neurological foundations of language without imposing a comprehensive new psychological theory of language.

The book is divided into two major parts. Part 1, ‘The basic specifications’, consists of five chapters providing an overview of relevant issues in sentence processing, language acquisition, neurolinguistics, and evolutionary biology. The five chapters are written for readers with little or no prior knowledge of these disciplines, providing the basis for the second part of the book, ‘The building blocks of language’. Part 2 consists of three case studies that consider the cognitive underpinnings of particular linguistic phenomena: the semantics of locative expressions, the status of morphological rules, and the syntax of questions. The final chapter of the book presents a sketch of cognitive grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991), which according to D provides a useful theoretical framework for the phenomena discussed in the preceding chapters.

Following a short introduction (Ch. 1), in which D emphasizes that linguistics can benefit from the insights of other disciplines, she begins with a chapter on sentence processing (Ch. 2) that characterizes her view of grammar. Language is a multidimensional phenomenon, and language processing can be a tremendously complex task. It involves the recognition of highly variable speech sounds, access to stored linguistic knowledge, the resolution of semantic ambiguities, the parsing of syntactic structures, and the integration of linguistic and nonlinguistic information into a coherent interpretation. All of these processes occur in milliseconds, causing great problems for computer programs designed to process natural language, while the human mind has no difficulties in producing and comprehending language. One reason why human beings are so good at processing language is that they make extensive use of simple heuristics, or ‘processing shortcuts’, that allow the human processor to deal with complex linguistic structures without [End Page 186]computing all of the information provided by the linguistic signal. More precisely, D argues and presents evidence from a variety of sources that speakers know a large number of prefabricated chunks and utterance formulas that are processed with very little effort because they are produced and interpreted as holistic units. Such ‘prefabs’ are immediately grounded in linguistic experience; they emerge from frequently occurring patterns in language use (Bybee 2001). Thus, what D suggests is that language processing and grammar tend to be much less complex than commonly assumed because they heavily rely on prefabricated chunks and utterance formulas.

Ch. 3 is concerned with language acquisition. In the generative approach it is commonly assumed that children learn language in a ‘remarkably uniform’ way with relatively little ‘guidance’ from the ambient language. Challenging this view, D cites evidence from several recent studies demonstrating that children may follow different pathways into language, which are crucially determined by the ambient language (e.g. Hampson & Nelson 1993). Moreover, D argues that human language acquisition is very robust in that children are able to acquire similar grammars under very different circumstances.

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