On Edge

[David Gil]

Dear all,

I also second Frans' comments, and those of Dan, Christian, and Edith.

Like many of us typologists, I was "educated" as a student within the 
Chomskyan tradition, and then grew up to reject many of its fundamental 
tenets.  But as noted earlier in this thread, it is important not to 
throw out the baby with the bathwater.  And when I think back to what I 
was taught in a generativists' Ling 100 course, one of the things that 
has withstood the test of time, as well as subsequent critiques of the 
generative enterprise, is the existence of linguistic universals, not 
just of a more substantive nature such as those listed by Frans, but 
also of a somewhat more abstract character, such as the following random 
selection:

• no language derives one sentence from another (eg. to form YN 
questions from declaratives) by reversing the order of words in the 
sentence.

• syntax can't count.  (Eg. no language forms YN questions from 
declaratives by marking the 5th word of the sentence.)

• when combining constituents A and B, no language does so by 
intercolation, eg. one word from A followed by one word from B, followed 
by one word from A, etc.

• all languages build up meaning-bearing signs (words, morphemes) from 
smaller non-meaning-bearing units (segments).

I have heard, in conversations, some of my typologists friends say that 
"there are no linguistic universals", but I think that statements such 
as the above, and many others like them, are indeed claims that can be 
made about all human languages, while not being things that we would 
neccessarily expect to find in a language spoken by litte green people 
from Alpha Centauri.  Thus, statements such as the above, alongside 
those listed by Frans, should be part of the unity that we are seeking 
within the diversity of human language.

David Gil


On 10/03/2014 20:57, Plank wrote:
>
> Dear typologists,
>
> typology is about linguistic diversity and unity, right?  I quote from 
> memory, but I'm sure I've seen this claim made in many a textbook, 
> sinngemaess.  At any rate that, this is what your papers were expected 
> to be about if they were to go into LT, because the mission statement 
> of that journal wanted them both, diversity and/in relation to unity. 
>  But then, tempora mutantur, nosque mutamur in illis.  Is this dual 
> assignment water under the bridge, yesteryear's snow, old hat, passé? 
>  Has our professional remit been assuaged?  Can we forget the unity 
> half?  So it indeed seems to the most complex and sophisticated minds.
>
> The annual question of Edge.org <http://Edge.org> for 2014 was:
>
>
>   WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT?
>   <http://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement>
>
> One of the candidates nominated for retirement -- alongside "The 
> Theory of Everything", "Urvogel", "People Are Sheep", "Languages 
> Conditioning Worldviews", "The Standard Approach to Meaning", 
> "Culture" (retired twice), "Only Scientists Can Do Science", "Planck's 
> Cynical View of Scientific Change", and some 170 other ideas (all at 
> http://www.edge.org/annual-questions) -- was "Universal Grammar".  I'm 
> copying this contribution in full below, in case you're not regular 
> followers of Edge.  (Edge ad speak about its business model: /"To 
> arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex 
> and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them 
> ask each other the questions they are asking themselves."/)
>
> The sentiment here expressed seems to be gaining popularity.  It is 
> typically vented outside professional fora, and not only by outsiders 
> who have heard the name Chomsky and otherwise know little about 
> linguistics, but also by professionals keen on maximising impact, at 
> the expense of having to somewhat overdo the rhetorics.
>
> But seriously, can anybody be confident that there are no universal 
> constraints on how languages can vary from one another, and that this 
> is a consensus to this effect among those scholars who ought to know 
> best (typologists, naturally)?  (Replace "languages" by "mental 
> lexicons-and-grammars" if you're a mentalist or by "doculects" if you 
> work with corpora.)  Is it really anywhere close to the truth that 
> "basically every proposed universal feature" has been empirically 
> shown to be invalid through crosslinguistic research?  (Which is 
> different from not having found much support from acquisition research 
> inspired by the Poverty of the Stimulus argument.  But that does not 
> seem what was at issue in the present Edge contribution.)  Conceivably 
> there is disagreement on whether linguistic universals are 
> genetic/innate language-specific biases or have one or another other 
> explanation.  (Such as, perhaps most promising, being constraints on 
> linguistic change, on transitions rather than on states.)  But that 
> wouldn't be denying that there ARE universals.
>
> Incidentally, Dan Everett is also on Edge.  He wants to retire an idea 
> seemingly similar:  'The idea that human behavior is guided by highly 
> specific innate knowledge has passed its sell-by date.  The 
> interesting scientific questions do not encompass either "instinct" or 
> "innate."'  But I'm sure Dan wouldn't dream of retiring linguistic 
> universals, such as these (almost) random examples:
>
> •  Provided a language distinguishes grammatically relevant lexical 
> classes ("parts of speech"), if there is one for property concepts, 
> there will also be distinct classes prototypically accommodating 
> thing/time-stable concepts and action/time-unstable concepts.
> •  If words other than those designating action concepts inflect for 
> tense, words designating action concepts will inflect for tense, too 
> (notwithstanding the possibility of nominal tense).
> •  If nouns inflect (most likely for number), verbs will inflect, too 
> (most likely for person, number, tense).
> •  Provided words designating property concepts are divided in their 
> allegiance between object words and action words in the grammar of 
> predication, then those designating human propensities will follow the 
> model of action words and those designating materials will follow the 
> model of object words.
> •  Provided a language distinguishes main and dependent clauses, the 
> morphosyntax and prosody of dependency will take predictable forms –– 
> too complex to go into here:  but it's all about deficits relative to 
> main clauses.
> •  Provided a language has numerals, if it has one for 9 it will also 
> have ones for 1-8, etc.
> •  Provided a language has numerals, the numeral system won't have 3, 
> 7, 9, or 11 as a base or as one of its bases (and I won't enumerate 
> the legitimate bases here:  there are more than have sometimes been 
> recognised:  2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, 60 -- read it up in LT).
> •  Provided a language has three series of numerals for (i) counting, 
> (ii) quantifying, (iii) locating in an ordered sequence, the 
> quantifying forms and/or their constructions won't be more complex 
> than the others;  if there are differences in complexity, they will be 
> the other way round.
> •  Syllable weight resides in the rhyme and cannot be contributed by 
> the onset (or not exclusively -- if you insist, Dan).
>
> And so on and on and on.  Are the valid/uninvalidated universals all 
> trivial/superficial, with the interesting/profound ones all invalid? 
>  I'd say that depends on what sense is made of such descriptive 
> generalisations.  Universals aren't discovered at a glance and aren't 
> self-explanatory:  in-depth analysis and proper sense-making are 
> integral parts of the typological enterprise together with the 
> inductive generalising.  (Since this seems so dear to the Edge author, 
> I'm not really sure there are known languages which entirely fail to 
> distinguish the lexical categories N and V, if properly analysed.)
>
> Obviously I'm not denying that many items documented in the Universals 
> Archive (http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/archive/intro/) are dubious or 
> defunct, especially as I have debunked many myself.  But I'd advise 
> against pushing the baby over the edge and throwing it out with the 
> bathwater.
>
> Innateness seems to be going through a bad patch in general:  Allison 
> Gopnik also wants it thrown out on Edge.  Encouragingly, Steven Pinker 
> only questions whether "Behavior = Genes + Environment".  And 
> anti-innateness, aka "Radical Behaviorism", is also up for retirement.
>
> Also on Edge, Ian McEwan questions the question (vindicating 
> Hoelderlin, not on Edge:  Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter): 
>  Beware of arrogance!  Retire nothing!
>
> If you find the rhetorical questioning of the existence of universals 
> a waste of time, we can perhaps still take inspiration from Edge and 
> ask ourselves:  Are there ideas in typology OTHER THAN universals 
> which are ready for retirement?  Your nominations, please!   Expect 
> restatements of LT's mission statement in due course.  However, for 
> the time being, unity is being kept along with diversity.
>
> Frans Plank
>
>
> PS:  If you've been wondering, Planck's Cynical View of Scientific 
> Change was as follows:  "A new scientific truth does not triumph by 
> convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather 
> because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up 
> that is familiar with it."  I hate to unretire and out-Planck Planck, 
> but I'm afraid that may be true of falsehoods, too.
>
>
> Sprachwissenschaft
> Universität Konstanz
> 78457 Konstanz
> Germany
>
> Tel  +49 (0)7531 88 2656
> Fax +49 (0)7531 88 4190
> eMail frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de <mailto:frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de>
> http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/plank/
>
>
> ********************************************
>
> <http://www.edge.org/memberbio/benjamin_k_bergen>
> *Benjamin K. Bergen* <http://www.edge.org/memberbio/benjamin_k_bergen>
> /Associate Professor, Cognitive Science, University of California, San 
> Diego; Author, Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind 
> Makes Meaning/
> /
> /
> /
> /
> Universal Grammar
>
> The world's languages differ to the point of inscrutability. Knowing 
> the English word "duck" doesn't help you guess the French "canard" or 
> Japanese "ahiru." But there are commonalities hidden beneath the 
> superficial differences. For instance, human languages tend to have 
> parts of speech (like nouns and verbs). They tend to have ways to 
> embed propositions in other ones. ("John knows that Mary thinks that 
> Paul embeds propositions in other ones.") And so on. But why?
>
> An influential and appealing explanation is known as /Universal 
> Grammar/: core commonalities across languages exist because they are 
> part of our genetic endowment. On this view, humans are born with an 
> innate predisposition to develop languages with very specific 
> properties. Infants expect to learn a language that has nouns and 
> verbs, that has sentences with embedded propositions, and so on.
>
> This could explain not only why languages are similar but also what it 
> is to be uniquely human and indeed how children acquire their native 
> language. It may also seem intuitively plausible, especially to people 
> who speak several languages: If English (and Spanish… and French!) 
> have nouns and verbs, why wouldn't every language? To date, Universal 
> Grammar remains one of the most visible products of the field of 
> Linguistics—the one minimally counterintuitive bit that former 
> students often retain from an introductory Linguistics class.
>
> But evidence has not been kind to Universal Grammar. Over the years, 
> field linguists (they're like field biologists with really good 
> microphones) have reported that languages are much more diverse than 
> originally thought. Not all languages have nouns and verbs. Nor do all 
> languages let you embed propositions in others. And so it has gone for 
> basically every proposed universal linguistic feature. The empirical 
> foundation has crumbled out from under Universal Grammar. We thought 
> that there might be universals that all languages share and we sought 
> to explain them on the basis of innate biases. But as the purportedly 
> universal features have revealed themselves to be nothing of the sort, 
> the need to explain them in categorical terms has evaporated. As a 
> result, what can plausibly make up the content of Universal Grammar 
> has become progressively more and more modest over time. At present, 
> there's evidence that nothing but perhaps the most general 
> computational principles are part of our innate language-specific 
> human endowment.
>
> So it's time to retire Universal Grammar. It had a good run, but 
> there's nothing much it can bring us now in terms of what we want to 
> know about human language. It can't reveal much about how language 
> develops in children—how they learn to articulate sounds, to infer the 
> meanings of words, to put together words into sentences, to infer 
> emotions and mental states from what people say, and so on. And the 
> same is true for questions about how humans have evolved or how we 
> differ from other animals. There are ways in which humans are unique 
> in the animal kingdom and a science of language ought to be trying to 
> understand these. But again Universal Grammar, gutted by evidence as 
> it has been, will not help much.
>
> Of course, it remains important and interesting to ask what 
> commonalities, superficial and substantial, tie together the world's 
> languages. There may be hints there about how human language evolved 
> and how it develops. But to ignore its diversity is to set aside the 
> most informative dimension of language.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550333
Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/

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