language learning

[Daniel L.Everett]

I also have a recent paper to appear on poverty of stimulus. The paper
is currently on my website. It is a review article on Givon's
Biolinguistics and Lightfoot and Anderson's The Language Organ,
contrasting those two approaches.

Among other things I point out, the generative literature on
acquisition largely assumes that language is learned from the written
form, i.e. devoid of intonation, among other things. Intonation alone
is enough to handle the famous Chomsky example that Brian mentions
below.

I also have another article on my website "Cultural Constraints on
Grammar in Piraha", currently under review, in which I argue that the
Piraha language not only forces a reconsideration of Hockett's 'design
features' of language, but that it strongly indicates that Piraha
speakers must learn cultural values before or along with grammar. This
is the reverse of the Whorf hypothesis (rather than language -->
thought --> culture, I argue that the Piraha case argues for both
culture --> language and language <--> culture).

There can be no content attributed to notions like 'poverty of
stimulus' or 'language organs' without consideration of intonation's
role (in conjunction with information structure) in the data, which
almost no one has done, but certainly not in the Chomskyan tradition.

Dan

P.S. I also point out in the review that some of Givon's experiments
fail to do the work he wants them to do because the math used to
support the conclusions is wrong.



On Wednesday, Jun 23, 2004, at 18:29 Europe/London, Brian MacWhinney
wrote:

> Dear Funknet,
>
>   Thanks to Geoff Nathan for picking up the ball on Rob Freeman's
> question about the logical problem of language acquisition. Although
> Chomsky floated some ideas in "Syntactic Structures" and "Aspects"
> about
> language being unlearnable because of degenerate input, that idea was
> abandoned when Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman showed that input to
> children
> was, if anything, even more grammatically well-formed than adult
> conversation.
>   Attention then turned to a particular version of "Plato's Problem"
> couched
> in terms of question formation in English, just as Geoff has noted. In
> the
> most publicized version of this discussion (from Piatelli-Palmarini,
> 1970), Chomsky discussed the unacceptability of questions like
>
> Is the boy who __ standing in line is tall?
>
> as opposed to
>
> Is the boy who is standing in line tall?
>
> The ungrammaticality of these is said to hinge on the Structural
> Dependency
> condition.
>
> This issue is discussed in great and clarifying detail by Geoff Pullum
> and
> Barbara Scholz in a target article in The Linguistic Review 1o from
> 2002.
> The whole issue is devoted to commentary on the Pullum-Scholz analysis.
>
> I have also been working on this topic, hoping to use the CHILDES
> database
> as a way of testing Chomsky's claims empirically. The results of my
> analysis will be coming out in the next issue of The Journal of Child
> Language, along with 12 additional commentaries.
>
> It would not be easy to summarize all of these discussions here.
> However,
> perhaps the most important outcome of my analysis, stimulated in many
> ways
> by the Pullum-Scholz analysis, is that there is good positive data
> available to the child for the learning of the Structural Dependency
> condition.
>
> In the end, I find myself agreeing with Chomsky on one basic point.
> This
> is the fact that children have a basic capacity to associate words into
> conceptual clusters that then can be treated as "chunked" wholes.  This
> operation is enough to allow for the emergence of structure.  There is
> no
> reason to believe that this type of structural dependency is
> exclusively
> linguistic, but I think it is reasonable to imagine that the evolution
> of
> language allowed our species to develop this ability beyond that of our
> closest biological relatives.
>
> The particular examples that Geoff Nathan cites involve a somewhat
> different constraint on raising.  For this constraint, an account based
> not just on
> the availability of positive evidence, but also on the conservative
> nature
> of the learning of wh-question patterns seems more appropriate.  Data
> providing evidence for this conservatism this comes from:
>
> Kuczaj, S., & Brannick, N. (1979). Children's use of the Wh question
> modal
> auxiliary placement rule. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 28,
> 43-67.
>
> --Brian MacWhinney
>
>

------------------------------------------

Daniel L. Everett
Professor of Phonetics & Phonology
Postgraduate Programme Director
Department of Linguistics
The University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester, UK M13 9PL
Fax/Office Phone: 44-161-275-3187
http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/DE/DEHome.html