Language and Other Cognitive Systems. What Is Special About Language?

Abstract

The traditional conception of language is that it is, in Aristotle's phrase, sound with meaning. The sound-meaning correlation is, furthermore, unbounded, an elementary fact that came to be understood as of great significance in the 17th century scientific revolution. In contemporary terms, the internal language (I-language) of an individual consists, at the very least, of a generative process that yields an infinite array of structured expressions, each interpreted at two interfaces, the sensory-motor interface (sound, sign, or some other sensory modality) for externalization and the conceptual-intentional interface for thought and planning of action. The earliest efforts to address this problem, in the 1950s, postulated rich descriptive apparatus—in different terms, rich assumptions about the genetic component of the language faculty, what has been called “universal grammar” (UG). That seemed necessary to provide for a modicum of descriptive adequacy. Also, many puzzles were discovered that had passed unnoticed, and in some cases still pose serious problems. A primary goal of linguistic theory since has been to try to reduce UG assumptions to a minimum, both for standard reasons of seeking deeper explanations, and also in the hope that a serious approach to language evolution, that is, evolution of UG, might someday be possible. There have been two approaches to this problem: one seeks to reduce or totally eliminate UG by reliance on other cognitive processes; the second has approached the same goal by invoking more general principles that may well fall within extra-biological natural law, particularly considerations of minimal computation, particularly natural for a computational system like language. The former approach is now prevalent if not dominant in cognitive science and was largely taken for granted 50 years ago at the origins of inquiry into generative grammar. It has achieved almost no results, though a weaker variant—the study of interactions between UG principles and statistical-based learning-theoretical approaches—has some achievements to its credit. The latter approach in contrast has made quite considerable progress. In recent years, the approach has come to be called “the minimalist program,” but it is simply a continuation of what has been undertaken from the earliest years, and while considered controversial, it seems to me no more than normal scientific rationality. One conclusion that appears to emerge with considerable force is that Aristotle's maxim should be inverted: language is meaning with sound, a rather different matter. The core of language appears to be a system of thought, with externalization a secondary process (including communication, a special case of externalization). If so, much of the speculation about the nature and origins of language is on the wrong track. The conclusion seems to accord well with the little that is understood about evolution of language, and with the highly productive studies of language acquisition of recent years.

Notes

¹The ECP, which states that an overt subject is required in this position, is a descriptive principle holding under various conditions that have been extensively studied. There have been efforts to explain it, some I think promising, but that would carry us too far afield here. It suffices here to recognize that the phenomenon illustrated falls under a descriptive principle of broad scope, and when properly formulated, should turn out to be universal for human language.

²Statistically speaking, language use is overwhelmingly internal–“speaking to oneself.” If one chooses to call this “communication,” thus depriving the term of much significance, then imagined social context is relevant.

³Elsewhere Tatersall (2005)suggests that human intelligence more generally is an “emergent quality, the result of a chance combination of factors, rather than a product of Nature's patient and gradual engineering over the eons.”

⁴The suggestion is borrowed from Zellig Harris (1951), who proposed it for identification of morphemes, keeping to the procedural assumptions of the day on largely “level-by-level” analysis. But morphemes are much more abstract elements, lacking the beads-on-a-string property necessary for the statistical analysis.

⁵The Shukla et al. (in press) paper expands on results of Charles Yang (2002). For more on such interactions, see Yang (2003), and for a lucid introduction, see Yang (2006). This material is rarely if ever cited in the triumphalist literature on successes of computational cognitive science, perhaps because it commits the heresy of assuming that language exists.

⁶ Chater and Christiansen (2010) also pose what they take to be a lethal dilemma for the minimalist program (concerning poverty of stimulus arguments), but their concerns are based on complete misunderstanding both of the program and these arguments, and failure to understand the reasons why for half a century theoretical linguistics has sought to overcome these arguments–adopting the minimalist program, even if not the name. For a sophisticated study of binding theory, within the minimalist program as it is actually understood, see Reuland (2011).

⁷Putting aside the irrelevant matter of use of language, the basic observation has an important element of truth, and in fact restates the formulation of binding theory principles in terms of minimal search (with the crucial qualifications investigated long ago).

⁸There are interesting cases where some residue of the lower copy is pronounced, or when some other modification marks position of copy erasure, lending further support to the general approach outlined here.

⁹For quotes from Ian Tatersall and evolutionary biologists (Nobel laureates) Salvador Luria and François Jacob, see Chomsky (2010).

¹⁰For some discussion, see Chomsky (1966), the first two chapters of Chomsky (1996), and particularly McGilvray (2005).