Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Two things to read

Here are a couple of readables that have entertained me recently.













So, the debate rages.














  1. With respect to the password idea, I thought you were going to go a different direction. Namely, why do humans acquire language, and not birdsong, or dog barking, or whatever? Because there is some property of human language that triggers acquisition of it as opposed to other kinds of vocal or gestural systems.

    1. I wasn't thinking of that, but nice point. What I was curious about is why specific languages are not pass-worded. Say there are parameters and say that one cares about one's group (the point Baker mooted), then one can now see how this might be coded genetically. However, as far as we know this did not happen. So why not? Why isn't there a genetic preference for SPECIFIC languages? I have no idea.

      Note that this its related to another question: why are there parameters to begin with? Why don't we just all speak one language? One syntax, one phonology, one morphology etc. The only "answer" I have been able to come up with is that coding for the entirety of G facilities is too expensive. Putting info in the genes is costly and so you put in as little as possible to allow the whole thing to get off the ground. If PLD sufficient to acquiring a G is reliably available and we have some kind of general learning mechanism that can use this info to fill in the blanks in the genetic program then the blanks will remain. I have no idea if this is right, but I can understand it. But, then given that there are blanks, why didn't different sub-communities of humans fill some of them in over time to give learners of that G a leg up? Dunno.

    2. Well the point Norbert raises here (if I understand it at all) is exactly Dan Everett's argument against there being a lot of genetically encoded UG. But it seems to me that the most potentially convincing experiments to show that there is zero genetic adaptation to prevailing grammatical structures never could have been performed in a sound way, even before there was any such thing as research ethics. Such as, grab a bunch of very young kids from villages in mainland SE Asia whose ancestors have been speaking 'isolating' languages for quite some time, and shift some them to pre-contact Navajo country to see how they go with Navajo verb inflection, to pre-contact Mornington Island to check them out on Kayardild case-stacking, etc. etc. But the confounding factors of different appearance and unusual provenence of the children would make such experiments unethical.

      Given that humans clearly adapt to climate and parasites in particular areas, the apparent lack of adaption to apparently stable and widespread grammatical properties is a bit puzzling.

    3. Yes, but the natural experiments of adoption seem to be convincing, even if the original languages may not be so carefully selected.

      One answer is the Chater, Christiansen one : namely that the time scale of language change is so much shorter than that of evolution that there isn't any coupling.

    4. But have the kids been tested enough for absolutely full proficiency in piling the case-markers, etc? For diseases, some 'racial' groups are more susceptible to certain diseases than others, but none are truly immune, afaik.

    5. Also, as I failed to include above, to really demonstrate the irrelevance of heredity to specific features of a supposed UG, you'ld need to test reasonably large groups of transplanted kids, similarly to what is done for epidemiological research, and there's clearly no way to do it, neither ethically nor practically.

    6. Agreed the definitive experiments will be hard to do. But at this time there is no evidence suggesting that the idealization (viz. that any kid can learn any language in the same way) is incorrect. Form what we can tell, it is roughly correct. So, the puzzle is prima facie reasonable. Given that we don't have just one G (there are differences) why aren't we differentially primed biologically to learn some more easily than others.

      Re Alex's point re Chater et al: not sure that ALL properties of a G change quickly. So though Gs may change over time some properties may be quite long lived. If so the problem reappears. Prima facie, the more parameters that are fixed biologically the fewer that need to be acquired and this should make the process easier. If so...

    7. But it is worth remembering that there is a lot of variability in the course and rate of child linguistic development and indeed in the level of adult performance. So there is some space for such effects to be hidden from us.