Another look at the universal grammar hypothesis: Commentary on Evans 2014

It is important to recognize that The language myth (TLM) is not a research monograph, but is instead aimed at a popular audience, and therefore it should be judged in this light. Popular books necessarily oversimplify certain issues, on pain of not being very popular, yet TLM does satisfy its intended purpose: it demonstrates, in a clear and engaging way, that the existence of a universal grammar, involving structure or syntactic knowledge that is unique to language and not learned, is quite far from established fact (see also e.g. Ambridge et al. 2014, Christiansen & Chater 2008, Elman et al. 1996, Evans & Levinson 2009, Everett 2012, Goldberg 2013, 2016, Hurford 2012, Newmeyer 2016, Sampson 2005, Tomasello 1995).

The position that TLM counters is no straw man, as the following easy-to-find quotes make clear (boldface added):

Two facts about language learning are indisputable. First, only a human baby, but not her pet kitten, can learn a language. It is clear, then, that there must be some element in our biology that accounts for this unique ability. Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG), an innate form of knowledge specific to language, is a concrete theory of what this ability is.

(Yang 2004:451)

Generative linguistic theory stands on the hypothesis that grammar cannot be acquired solely on the basis of an analysis of the input, but depends, in addition, on innate structure within the learner to guide the process of acquisition.

(Lidz et al. 2003:295)

the most controversial claim of Noam Chomsky’s is that Language is also an instinct. Many parts of Language are built in, or innate. Much of Language is an ability hard-wired into our brains by our genes … . There are very good reasons to believe … that a human faculty for Language (perhaps in the form of a ‘Language organ’ in the brain) is innate. We call this facility Universal Grammar (or UG).

(Carnie 2013:19)

Many of the familiar arguments in favor of a universal grammar are addressed and countered in TLM, and the book weaves together discussions drawn from research in linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and anthropology. Evans agrees that human language is distinct from animal communication in many ways, even while he draws certain parallels between them (Ch. 2). While it follows from this generally agreed-upon conclusion that humans’ general capacity for language is in some way unique to our species, it simply does not follow that any knowledge or structure that is specific to language need be ‘innate’ (cf. Adger 2015:77 and the first quote above). Instead, a combination of prerequisites for language may be required, prerequisites that need not themselves be specific to language and that may interact with one another and the environment in complicated ways (Ch. 4). This more subtle perspective concerning how phenotypes relate to genotypes has much evidence in its favor and is, in fact, uncontroversial within biology generally (see Blumberg 2005 for a popular overview).

E addresses the issue of whether there exists evidence of provable (i.e. falsifiable) language universals in Ch. 3. He briefly surveys a range of work on absolute and implicational (i.e. ‘if a language has X, then it has Y’) universals, and covers topics ranging from phonology to syntax in clear and jargon-free prose. He concludes that falsifiable language universals are relatively rare and are typically explicable in terms of the functional pressures of communication as well as domain-general constraints (see also Newmeyer 2016).

Ch. 4 focuses on language acquisition, emphasizing the role of statistics in the input, as well as the functions of constructions that are learned. This chapter also reviews some important evidence that human ‘cultural-intelligence’ serves as a key and uniquely human prerequisite for language (see also Ch. 8; and for relevant data, see Herrmann et al. 2007, Tomasello 2009).

Ch. 5 discusses the neural underpinnings of language, emphasizing arguments against a modular linguistic system. Here it may be worth pointing out that even if there do exist areas in the typically developed adult brain that are devoted to language (as argued in Fedorenko et...