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<p>Sidi saw this story on the BBC News website and thought you<br>should see it.<br><br><br><br>** 'Language universals' challenged **<br>A long-standing idea that languages share universal features dictated by human brain structure is cast into doubt.<br>< <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/science-environment-13049700">http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/science-environment-13049700</a> ><br><br><div><div id="header-wrapper"><h2 id="header"><span class="section-title">Science & Environment</span>
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<span class="date">14 April 2011</span>
<span class="time-text">Last updated at </span><span class="time">22:24 GMT</span>
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<h1 class="story-header">Language universality idea tested with biology method</h1>
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<span class="byline-name">By Jason Palmer</span>
<span class="byline-title">Science and technology reporter, BBC News</span>
</span><p class="introduction" id="story_continues_1">A
long-standing idea that human languages share universal features that
are dictated by human brain structure has been cast into doubt.</p><p>A study <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09923.html">reported in Nature</a> has borrowed methods from evolutionary biology to trace the development of grammar in several language families.</p><p>The results suggest that features shared across language families evolved independently in each lineage.</p><p>The authors say cultural evolution, not the brain, drives language development.</p><p>At the heart of both studies is a method based on what are known as phylogenetic studies.</p><p>Lead author Michael Dunn, an evolutionary linguist at the Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, said the
approach is akin to the study of pea plants by Gregor Mendel, which
ultimately led to the idea of heritability of traits.</p><p>"By looking at variation amongst the descendant plants and
knowing how they were related to each other, [Mendel] could work out the
mechanisms that must govern that variation," Dr Dunn explained to BBC
News.</p><p>"He inferred the existence of some kind of information
transfer just from knowing family trees and observing variation, and
that's exactly the same thing we're doing."</p>
<span class="cross-head">Family trees</span><p>Modern phylogenetics studies look at variations in animals
that are known to be related, and from those can work out when specific
structures evolved.</p><p>For their studies, the team studied the characteristics of
word order in four language families: Indo-European, Uto-Aztec, Bantu
and Austronesian.</p><p>They considered whether what we call prepositions occur
before or after a noun ("in the boat" versus "the boat in") and how the
word order of subject and object work out in either case ("I put the dog
in the boat" versus "I the dog put the canoe in").</p><p>The method starts by making use of well-established
linguistic data on words and grammar within these language families, and
building "family trees" of those languages.</p><p>"Once we have those trees we look at distribution of these
different word order features over the descendant languages, and build
evolutionary models for what's most likely to produce the diversity that
we observe in the world," Dr Dunn said.</p><p>The results showed that, although grammatical features were
shared across the families, the way that the features arose depended
strongly on the history of development of language features within the
families. </p><p>In a parallel to convergent evolution in biology - in which
analogous structures in unrelated animals can evolve independently -
grammatical constructs follow their own independent evolutionary paths.</p><p>"We show that each of these language families evolves
according to its own set of rules, not according to a universal set of
rules," Dr Dunn explained.</p><p>"That is inconsistent with the dominant 'universality
theories' of grammar; it suggests rather that language is part of not a
specialised module distinct from the rest of cognition, but more part of
broad human cognitive skills."</p><p>The paper asserts instead that "cultural evolution is the
primary factor that determines linguistic structure, with the current
state of a linguistic system shaping and constraining future states".</p><p>However, co-author and evolutionary biologist Russell Gray of
the University of Auckland stressed that the team was not pitting
biology against culture in a mutually exclusive way.</p><p>"We're not saying that biology is irrelevant - of course it's not," Professor Gray told BBC News.</p><p>"But the clumsy argument about an innate structure of the
human mind imposing these kind of 'universals' that we've seen in
cognitive science for such a long time just isn't tenable."</p><p>Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard University, called the work "an important and welcome study".</p><p>However, Professor Pinker told BBC News that the finer
details of the method need bearing out in order to more fully support
their hypothesis that cultural boundaries drive the development of
language more than biological limitations do.</p><p>"The [authors] suggest that the human mind has a tendency to
generalise orderings across phrases of different types, which would not
occur if the mind generated every phrase type with a unique and isolated
rule. </p><p>"The tendency may be partial, and it may be elaborated in
different ways in differently language families, but it needs an
explanation in terms of the working of the mind of language speakers."</p></div></div></div></div></div><div><br><br>** BBC Daily E-mail **<br>Choose the news and sport headlines you want - when you want them, all<br>in one daily e-mail<br>< <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/email">http://www.bbc.co.uk/email</a> ><br><br><br>** Disclaimer **<br>The BBC is not responsible for the content of this e-mail, and anything written in this e-mail does not necessarily reflect the BBC's views or opinions. Please note that neither the e-mail address nor name of the sender have been verified.<br><br>If you do not wish to receive such e-mails in the future or want to know more about the BBC's Email a Friend service, please read our frequently asked questions. <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/4162471.stm</a><br></div></p>
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