Givon on PirahaN and universals

[Jagdish Jain]

Dear Funknetters,

Givon wrote that the article (Hauser et al. 2002) was one more 
attempt "to resurrect 'competence' as the bastion of pure 
innateness." I am confused. The word "bastion" metaphorically means 
"a defensive stronghold." Is Givon trying to say that the notion of 
'competence' is being resurrected as a defensive stronghold for "pure 
innateness." Further, what does the modifier "pure" mean in this 
context. Is there "impure" innateness?

Chomsky used the term 'competence' in the 1960s in the sense of a 
native speaker's TACIT knowledge of his her language. The concept 
"tacit" has no connection with the concept "innate." Because of the 
confusion created by the term 'competence,' Chomsky has started using 
the term I-language (= internalized linguistic system) to label the 
concept of "a native speaker's tacit knowledge of his or her 
language." I think I-language is a much better term than competence 
to describe the concept. I-LANGUAGE IS NOT INNATE, NOR A BASTION TO 
INNATENESS. I-LANGUAGE IS ACQUIRED.

The notion of 'recursion/recursiveness/recursivity' has a precise 
meaning: if you take two constituency principles that involve a 
category on the left of one rewrite rule and the same category on the 
right of the second rewrite rule, you have set up the property called 
'recursion' For example, if a clause has a constituent called VP, and 
that VP has a constituent called clause, you have succeeded in 
creating the property called recursion. Informally, this kind of 
recursion is called 'clause embedding." Recursion is not limited to 
clause embedding. Recursion is a wide spread design feature of 
language; it is not a FRAMEWORK (as Givon calls it).

I would like to emphasize that a "complex linguistic construction" 
(whatever that means) may not involve any recursion. Nobody has 
suggested any metric for "complexity" of a linguistic construction.

Jagdish Jain