#biolinguistics

Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (HCF) wrote a paper in 2002 entitled The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? It explicitly introduced an important distinction between the Faculty of Language in the Broad Sense (FLB) and the Faculty of Language in the Narrow Sense (FLN).

FLB is made up of all the components used in language, e.g. ability for vocal learning, ability to conceptualise, a sensori-motor system, a computational system (syntax) capable of recursion etc. FLN is a subset of FLB, i.e. everything in FLN is also in FLB but not vice versa. More specifically, FLN contains only those components of FLB which are uniquely human. HCF hypothesise that FLN only contains recursion and that all other aspects of language (i.e. what constitutes the rest of FLB) can be found in non-human species.

You might not agree with HCF in terms of what to assign to FLN, but the general distinction is both useful and perhaps necessary for tackling the issue of language evolution. The first question of HCF’s title (what is it?) involves filling in the FLB category – and obviously we need to know what it is we are trying to explain the evolution of! The second question (who has it?) involves deciding whether something belongs to FLN as well. If we put something in the FLN box, we are saying it is uniquely human. This can be tested (in principle – how easy it is to test is another matter!) and this is one place where interdisciplinary research between biology and linguistics can be very fruitful and informative. Basically, from an evolution of language perspective, we want to know what exactly (if anything) makes human language special. This then leads to the third question – we can ask how the uniquely human part of language evolved, i.e. we can ask how did FLN evolve rather than the much larger question of how did FLB evolve.

Of course, having done all that, FLN might turn out to be empty! Perhaps human language is not qualitatively different, only quantitatively different. But let’s wait to see what we find!

I haven’t written anything for a while since I’ve been so busy recently (been working a lot on the typology of relative clauses - perhaps I’ll post something about that soon). This evening I watched an interview (on YouTube) from the late 1970’s (1977, I think) with Chomsky. The interview is from a series called “Men of Ideas” produced by the BBC.

It’s a great interview - stimulating and perceptive questions and, of course, stimulating and perceptive answers! Many things caught my attention, one of which being that Chomsky spoke of two factors playing a role in language design, namely the biological endowment (i.e. Universal Grammar (UG) - the species- and domain-specific cognitive ‘organ’ dealing with language) and linguistic experience (i.e. the primary linguistic data from which we acquire our native language(s)). The idea was that all humans are born with a capacity for language, i.e. UG is innate in humans, provided by our genetic makeup. The data we encounter as children is so scant and degenerate (full of false starts, sentence fragments, etc.) that it would be virtually impossible to acquire a grammar in the short amount of time that it takes any normal child to do so the world over…unless we came pre-programmed for such a task. The idea was that UG was this pre-programming. UG was thought to be richly specified with linguistic principles (all genetically encoded) that would help children in the task of language acquisition by severely constraining the possible hypotheses that any child would postulate when acquiring a grammar to generate the data the child was exposed to. That was then.

Nowadays, Chomsky speaks not of two factors, but of three factors of language design. UG and the primary linguistic data are the first and second factors respectively. The third factor is made up of general principles of data analysis and efficient computation. The idea is that children can bring these domain-general (i.e. not exclusively related to language) tools to language acquisition. The third factor allows the first factor, i.e. UG, to be made much smaller. In other words, UG is no longer thought to be as richly specified as it once was. In fact, the aim is to make UG as small as possible. This is desirable for a number of reasons, but a particularly pertinent reason concerns the evolution of language, i.e. the evolution of the capacity for language in humans. As an 'organ’ of the mind, UG is a biological entity, and as such it must have evolved (though not necessarily through direct selection, as Chomsky points out in the interview!). Given that chimpanzees do not have UG, UG must have evolved some time in the last 5-7 million years or so. It is therefore unlikely that something as rich and complex as UG as it was originally conceived could have evolved in such an evolutionarily short space of time. The third factors, however, need not be specific to language, nor do they need to be specific to humans. Therefore, it is conceptually desirable if we can explain the design of language in terms of third factors. This is, in fact, viewed as the only source of principled explanation in Chomskyan syntax nowadays.

Importantly, although UG is far smaller than it was and may only consist of very few things (a recursive structure building operation at the very least), it is nevertheless still thought to exist. The UG hypothesis in its modern incarnation is thus still very different from approaches which deny the existence of UG altogether.

Anyway, if you’re interested, I suggest reading Chomsky’s (2005) paper:

Chomsky, N. (2005). Three Factors in Language Design. Linguistic Inquiry 36: 1, 1-22.

I have just finished reading Lenneberg’s 1967 seminal book The Biological Foundations of Language. It was, and still is, an incredibly insightful attempt to bring linguistics and biology closer together into what is currently called biolinguistics. It was also way ahead of its time in terms of the conceptual framework which underpins the biological theory of language proposed in the book. By amassing and integrating evidence from anatomy, neurology, cognitive science, evolutionary theory, developmental biology, child language acquisition, semantics, phonology and syntax, Lenneberg creates a theory of language based on a few far-reaching principles.

First, language is viewed as a species-specific behaviour. Every species is different in terms of how they develop and mature. To the extent that behaviour is based on neurophysiological properties of the organism and that neurophysiology is a product of species-specific paths of development and maturation, language can be considered a species-specific behaviour resulting from the human-specific ontogenetic process. Evidence for this includes well-documented and universal milestones in language development, sometimes even in the absence of appropriate linguistic stimuli.

Second, there does not appear to be any part of the brain dedicated to language. Certainly, there are regions of the brain (and particularly of the left hemisphere) which play a more significant role in language, but in general language is well-integrated into the cerebral structure as a whole. This makes it likely that language evolved from the outset as a complex integration of many parts; it is unlikely that the subcomponents of language evolved separately and only recently became unified.

Third, language structure exhibits evidence of three basic processes: (1) categorisation, (2) differentiation, and (3) transformation. Categorisation involves generalising over stimuli, i.e. creating an abstract representation. Differentiation involves splitting categories in various ways. Transformation involves being able to identify similarities between categories, i.e. being able to identify how one category is related to another in a systematic way. Lenneberg argues that these are cognitive skills which have been integrated into the structure of language. Furthermore, because every infant effectively creates language anew, these are the processes involved in language acquisition, for example, early child utterances go through a one-word stage, followed by a two-word stage, then simple sentences etc. This potentially shows differentiation in that one-word utterances are whole child sentences. As the child differentiates the earliest syntactic category into two (say, head and modifier), we begin to observe two-word utterances etc.

Fourth, environmental triggers are necessary for the proper actualisation of one’s innate potential for language. These triggers must be available during maturation otherwise the behaviour will not develop properly, i.e. there is a critical period for (first) language acquisition. The acquisition of language is thus a matter of nature and nurture, innateness andlearning.

There are other principles which Lenneberg summarises in the final chapter, but these give a flavour of the framework in which his theory is set. Language is at its foundations a biological phenomenon, and biolinguistics can help us formulate and pursue questions to understand it in a more insightful and informed way.

“…it is quite clear that breathing undergoes peculiar changes during speech. What is astonishing about this is that man can tolerate these modifications for an apparently unlimited period of time without experiencing respiratory distress, as is well demonstrated by the interminable speeches with which many a statesman embellishes his political existence.”

“…the latter two occupations [playing a wind instrument and singing] require careful instruction and training in proper breathing, whereas speaking for hours continually seems to come all too naturally to many a three-year-old.”

From Eric H. Lenneberg’s 1967 book Biological Foundations of Language.