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  • On Biology, History and Culture in Human Language: A Critical Overview by Juan-Carlos Moreno, and José-Luis Mendívil-Giró
  • Ingo R. Stoehr
Juan-Carlos Moreno and José-Luis Mendívil-Giró. On Biology, History and Culture in Human Language: A Critical Overview. Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2014. 181p.

Any book that begins with Dante has to be good. Juan-Carlos Moreno and José-Luis Mendívil-Giró refer to Dante’s distinction between vernacular and literary languages. In his practice as a writer, of course, Dante ironically used literary Latin to praise the vernacular in his De Vulgari Eloquentia but the vernacular to rival the Homeric Greek and the Virgilian Latin in his Commedia. Moreno and Mendívil-Giró do not mention this irony but use the Dante reference to establish the fundamental difference between natural language (NL) and cultivated language (CL), which underlies their main argument (that the Chomskyan Minimalist Program is the right way to do theoretical linguistics) at a much more abstract level.

The authors continually contrast what they call the current “two great ‘paradigms’ of language research” (44). First, the biolinguistic paradigm is based on Chomsky’s assumption of a Universal Grammar (UG), the paradigm the authors embrace. Second, the functional-cognitive paradigm does not necessarily deny “the human capacity for language” (40) but understands this capacity as part of more general cognitive systems, rather than as a specifically “linguistic” system. The “big picture” contrast is natural versus cultural. But looking at the specifics discussed, I sensed a relatively fine distinction between the two paradigms that seem to share a good deal of common ground so that future research may promise a better answer than a theoretical decision at the current time. However, Moreno and Mendívil-Giró argue that the two paradigms are different enough in terms of how each views language so that their respective research programs are significantly different. And this difference hinges on the distinction between NL and CL.

First, the linguistic competence that each child acquires without explicit instruction is that individual child’s (and, later, adult’s) I-language, which is contingent on Universal Grammar. Second, a NL is understood as “a population” of I-languages (7). Third, a CL (such as any written language) is “the product of certain partial elaborations of ” a NL; as a result of its explicit rules, a CL is not acquired but learned (9). A CL, therefore, is always an E-language, that is, an external manifestation of “certain linguistic behaviors … during the performance of our” NL (17) in a cultural, social context. NLs evolve in a non-teleological (Darwinian) way while CLs evolve in a teleological (Lamarckian) way.

This distinction results in other distinctions, for example, that of language evolution versus language change. Language evolution, which occurred on an almost geological timescale probably about 100,000 years ago, refers to the emergence of the faculty of language (FL as part of UG), which is specific to homo sapiens sapiens and “is shared by all humans, across the species” [End Page 102] (David Lightfoot, qtd. 84). Only then did human “languages” as we know them evolve. Across all linguistic diversity, these “languages” evidence not only the same “degree of complexity” since any later language change does not affect the biological basis, but also, because they are all based on the FL, one and the same language. The functional-cognitive paradigm, which does not assume any form of FL, may lead to very different descriptions and predictions, such as not assuming one (uniform) language but, indeed, various profoundly independent languages that may even exist at different degrees of complexity.

In contrast, language change accounts for the diversity that characterizes the various manifestations of human language (in accordance with UG). Some of these changes occur over short periods of time with language acquisition. Without direct access to the I-languages of adults, a child develops his/her own I-language based on “the linguistic performance” (83) he/she is exposed to. Although linguistic performance is culturally influenced and although the child’s I-language is in essence a new linguistic competence, that is, different from the adults’ I-languages (thus accounting for some...

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