I’m so confused. Not long ago, I quickly read an article about a study which cast doubt upon the idea that we have grammatical structures, as conjectured by Noam Chomsky, built into our brains. Didn’t pay much attention, but I think the news article might have been about this study — Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Now another study, Artificial Grammar Learning Reveals Inborn Language Sense, seems to give clear evidence that we do have such inbuilt structures. Maybe there’s some small amount of insight in a poem I put in my novel The Open Independence of the Seas.
Scientific Discourse
YES!
NO!
YES!
NO!
For a more somber discussion of the possibility that we’re born with sentence diagrams (I’m dating myself) in our heads, see The Evolution of Language in a Rational World. (I just googled for “sentence diagrams” and they seem to be somewhat back in fashion, so I might be very young and precocious instead of middle-aged and slowing down in my thinking.)
Those interested in the issue of “language and brain” might wish to follow John Hawks’ weblog as he plans on dealing more with that issue — start with Blueprints and recipes and go into his archives if you wish.
For now, this grammar stuff has perhaps the most interesting and most accessible of the nature-nurture questions, though the sex-related questions are, well, sexier. Grammar might be easier to discuss at your next church social. In any case, the issues seem fairly straightforward and might be a good way to test various ideas of what sorts of entities our minds really are. And it’s not as boring as standing at the old chalkboard trying to diagram Churchill’s famous dictum:
This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.
Churchill may or may not have said something like this or may or may not have said it differently but several books on standard English usage have attributed something of the sort to him after having one of his sentences rearranged by an editor who was allergic to prepositions terminating in periods. I’ve also read a variant story where a subordinate presented him with a memo containing a sentence made clumsy to avoid ending with a preposition. Most variants of the story avoid “bloody” which is arguably a sacrilegious reference to the Mother of God. As is the case with scientific research beyond the most trivial issues, everything quickly gets as entangled as spaghetti piled high. Did you every play Post-office? This sort of confusion with the factual world is one reason I prefer to develop metaphysical theories about the factual world.
By the way, some seemingly knowledgeable commentators on that paper from nature, Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals, say that it’s wrong to interpret the underlying research as showing Chomsky is wrong — the paper only shows that word-order is strongly affected by social evolution but that doesn’t affect any arguments about ‘deep’ grammatical structures in the brain. That makes sense to me since I know from personal experience that speakers and writers of Scottish English, or one of the more Germanic and less English variants, often used minor but noticeable inversions of word-order relative to London English or American English. Yet, they are all dialects of the same language — at least at the English end of the spectrum as opposed to the Germanic end of the spectrum. Sigh! In any case, all these languages are products of the same biological and social evolutionary processes so long as you go back a thousand years or so, which isn’t long in evolutionary terms.
Remember — even if you’re an amateur — you’re responsible for evaluating the stuff you read in even the most prestigious journals — if it’s important to you or you plan on endorsing a controversial view, then look for critiques from reliable commentators. Certainly, you should always be careful about any popular science articles or news summaries. It’s best in controversial matters to identify reliable thinkers who will be forthright about their own opinions but capable of honestly evaluating opposing opinions.
And notice how often words like ‘variant’ can be used in discussions of these efforts to gain a more abstract understanding of this factually messy world.