Beyond caricatures: Commentary on Evans 2014

‘In order to understand what another person is saying you must assume it is true, and try to imagine what it might be true of.’

—George Miller, quoted by Ross (1982:8)

As will be familiar to a Language audience, many of the central questions of language study were identified by luminaries of language—Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hermann Paul, Ferdinand de Saussure, Mikołaj Kruszewski, William Dwight Whitney, Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, John R. Firth, Roman Jakobson, and Charles Hockett, among others—who preceded both mainstream generative grammar (MGG) and modern cognitive/functional approaches.¹ These earlier generations of linguists were both awed and challenged by the intriguing properties of human languages. How can they be understood as biological, physiological, cognitive, and/or social objects? What is the relation between the synchronic and diachronic aspects of language, and how does this impact the definition of the linguistic objects to be explained? What is the nature of the different (sub)systems that make up language, and how are they learned so quickly, without explicit instruction? Are there unifying properties underlying the obvious diversity of languages? Can an understanding of other animal communication systems provide insight into human language? How does language development, both in communities and in individuals, relate to issues concerning phylogenetic and ontogenetic development of other traits and behaviors in different complex adaptive systems?

Today, theoretical linguists largely agree that these and other big mysteries present challenges for the scientific study of human language. Divergences among modern approaches largely come down to the different bets they make about the best ways to address these questions. Disagreements concern different hypotheses about appropriate analytic assumptions, relevant methodologies of inquiry, effective theoretical constructs, the relevance of empirical crosslinguistic data to favorite theoretical assumptions and theory construction, and the relations between linguistic inquiry and research in other disciplines that explore the phylogeny and ontogeny of other natural complex phenomena. So, one could argue, it is not the fundamental questions that distinguish different approaches, but rather the variety of hypotheses marshaled to address them. In this context, theoretical linguistics should exhibit vigorous, substantive cross-theoretical debate about both analyses of particular phenomena and the general assumptions and methodologies that guide competing analyses.

If this was the state of discourse among the more commanding voices in the field, we doubt that Evans’s The language myth (TLM) would have been written. The book reflects the combat rather than the convergences (both acknowledged and not) concerning ideas and methodologies that have begun to characterize modern research in grammar. Many linguists are collaborating and synthesizing across research traditions and theories that have conventionally ignored one another or paid just enough attention to disparage each other, largely by misrepresentation and triumphal dismissal. The new pluralistic and interdisciplinary research is moving beyond the caricatures of familiar theoretical paradigms. TLM and the responses from MGG that it has generated, however, seem set on perpetuating the culture of caricature. This diminishes a focus on the necessarily multidisciplinary qualitative and quantitative study of language and, thereby, impoverishes efforts to popularize its real mysteries and results.

We suspect that many readers will find the tone of TLM to be baitingly belligerent and occasionally obnoxious: for example, E employs sometimes recurring dismissive phrases (‘the language-as-instinct crowd’, ‘Chomsky and co.’, ‘self-dubbed evolutionary psychologists’, ‘swathes of fervent followers’, etc.) and makes irritating references to ‘supermodels’ in language examples throughout. He intends to deliver a drubbing and does so in a way that likely would leave a critical but naive reader wondering what is wrong with this unfamiliar field called linguistics. It is a jeremiad against perceived inequity, if not iniquity, in the house of language analysis.²

E places a vigorous focus on ‘debunking the myths’, as he understands them:

While I, and a great many other professional linguists, now think the old view is wrong, nevertheless, the old view—Universal Grammar [(UG)]: the eponymous ‘language myth’—still lingers; despite being completely wrong, it is...