The Fitch, Hauser and Chomsky versus Jackendoff and Pinker Polemic

The Faculty of Language: What's Special about it?

By Steven Pinker and Ray Jackendoff

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, agreement, and many properties of words. It is inconsistent with the anatomy and neural control of the human vocal tract. And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion. The recursion-only claim, we suggest, is motivated by Chomsky's recent approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, which de-emphasizes the same aspects of language. The approach, however, is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution. We contest related arguments that language is not an adaptation, namely that it is "perfect," non-redundant, unusable in any partial form, and badly designed for communication. The hypothesis that language is a complex adaptation for communication which evolved piecemeal avoids all these problems.

Appeared in Cognition Volume 95, Issue 2 , March 2005

Posted by Tony Marmo at 02:02 BST

Updated: Sunday, 4 September 2005 02:33 BST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Formal grammar and information theory: together again?

By Fernando Pereira

In the last forty years, research on models of spoken and written language has been split between two seemingly irreconcilable traditions: formal linguistics in the Chomsky tradition, and information theory in the Shannon tradition. Zellig Harris had advocated a close alliance between grammatical and information-theoretic principles in the analysis of natural language, and early formal-language theory provided another strong link between information theory and linguistics. Nevertheless, in most research on language and computation, grammatical and information theoretic approaches had moved far apart.
Today, after many years in the defensive, the information-theoretic approach has gained new strength and achieved practical successes in speech recognition, information retrieval, and, increasingly, in language analysis and machine translation. The exponential increase in the speed and storage capacity of computers is the proximate cause of these engineering successes, allowing the automatic estimation of the parameters of probabilistic models of language by counting occurrences of linguistic events in very large bodies of text and speech. However, I will also argue that information-theoretic and computational ideas are playing an increasing role in the scienti c understanding of language, and will help bring together formal-linguistic and information-theoretic perspectives.

Keywords: Formal linguistics; information theory; machine learning

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST

Updated: Sunday, 4 September 2005 01:47 BST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE FACULTY: CLARIFICATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

By W. Tecumseh Fitch, Marc D. Hauser & Noam Chomsky

In this response to Pinker and Jackendoff's critique, we extend our previous framework for discussion of language evolution, clarifying certain distinctions and elaborating on a number of points. In the first half of the paper, we reiterate that profitable research into the biology and evolution of language requires fractionation of "language" into component mechanisms and interfaces, a non-trivial endeavor whose results are unlikely to map onto traditional disciplinary boundaries. Our terminological distinction between FLN and FLB is intended to help clarify misunderstandings and aid interdisciplinary rapprochement. By blurring this distinction, Pinker and Jackendoff mischaracterize our hypothesis, which concerns only FLN, not "language" as a whole. Many of their arguments and examples are thus irrelevant to this hypothesis. Their critique of the minimalist program is for the most part equally irrelevant, because very few of the arguments in our original paper were tied to this program; in an online appendix we detail the deep inaccuracies in their characterization of this program.
Concerning evolution, we believe that Pinker and Jackendoff's emphasis on the past adaptive history of the language faculty is misplaced. Such questions are unlikely to be resolved empirically due to a lack of relevant data, and invite speculation rather than research. Preoccupation with the issue has retarded progress in the field by diverting research away from empirical questions, many of which can be addressed with comparative data. Moreover, offering an adaptive hypothesis as an alternative to our hypothesis concerning mechanisms is a logical error, as questions of function are independent of those concerning mechanism. The second half of our paper consists of a detailed response to the specific data discussed by Pinker and Jackendoff. Although many of their examples are irrelevant to our original paper and arguments, we find several areas of substantive disagreement that could be resolved by future empirical research. We conclude that progress in understanding the evolution of language will require much more empirical research, grounded in modern comparative biology, more interdisciplinary collaboration, and much less of the adaptive storytelling and phylogenetic speculation that has traditionally characterized the field.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST

Updated: Sunday, 4 September 2005 02:17 BST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

Inateness and Brain-Wring Optimization:

Non-genomic nativism

by Chistopher Cherniak

The study of minimization of neural connections reveals interrelations between the Innateness Hypothesis and theses associated with the Central Dogma of genetics. The discussion of innateness here shifts from the usual focus upon abstract cognitive structure instead to underlying brain hardware structure, to hardwired neuroanatomy.

Experimental work in computational neuroanatomy has uncovered distinctively efficient layout of wiring in nervous systems. When mechanisms are investigated by which such "best of all possible brains" design is attained, significant instances turn out to emerge "for free, directly from physics": Such generation of optimal brain structure appears to arise simply by exploiting basic physical processes, without need for intervention of genes. An idea that physics suffices here--of complex biological structure as self-organizing, generated without genomic activity--turns attention to the role of the genome in morphogenesis. The familiar "nature / nurture" alternatives for origins of basic internal mental structure are that it arises either from the genome or from invariants of the external environment. A third alternative is explored for the cases here, a non-genomic nativism.

Download

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST

Updated: Saturday, 3 September 2005 23:07 BST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

The Nature of the Language Faculty and its Implications for Evolution of Language

[Reply to Fitch, Hauser & Chomsky]
By Ray Jackendoff & Steven Pinker

In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the "narrow language faculty") consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We argue that their characterization of the narrow language faculty is problematic for many reasons, including its dichotomization of cognitive capacities into those that are utterly unique and those that are identical to nonlinguistic or nonhuman capacities, omitting capacities that may have been substantially modified during human evolution. We also question their dichotomy of the current utility versus original function of a trait, which omits traits that are adaptations for current use, and their dichotomy of humans and animals, which conflates similarity due to common function and similarity due to inheritance from a recent common ancestor.
We show that recursion, though absent from other animals' communications systems, is found in visual cognition, hence cannot be the sole evolutionary development that granted language to humans. Finally, we note that despite Fitch et al.'s denial, their view of language evolution is tied to Chomsky's conception of language itself, which identifies combinatorial productivity with a core of "narrow syntax." An alternative conception, in which combinatoriality is spread across words and constructions, has both empirical advantages and greater evolutionary plausibility.

To appear in Cognition

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST

Updated: Saturday, 3 September 2005 23:00 BST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink

THE POSITION OF SEMANTICS WITHIN CONTEMPORARY COGNITIVE SCIENCE

By Mihailo Antovic´

This paper provides an analysis of the importance of some present-day semantic theories for contemporary cognitive science. The question of the scope of cognitive science(s) is discussed, followed by a short overview of the study of linguistics in this multidisciplinary enterprise. Finally, three modern approaches to semantics within this framework are discussed (cognitive, truth-conditional and conceptual) and their advantages and disadvantages are briefly summarized. Conceptual semantics is singled out as a rather plausible approach to the study of meaning, even though it is often deemed of lesser importance by authoritative scholars. Some speculations as to the further development of semantics are hypothesized.

Key words: cognition, cognitive science, cognitive semantics, truth-conditional semantics, conceptual semantics

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST

Updated: Wednesday, 31 August 2005 06:20 BST

Share This Post

Post Comment | Permalink