Subject: lg & species

the language & species discussion has not recurred this week , but i had already prepared the following , which i think would be of general enough interest to the recurrent misunderstandings about innateness and human language to publish on the list . since my last posting on the language & species discussion i have received some interesting comments and checked on the reference that i had in mind ( since i own a copy ) . the reference is a volume called " speaking of apes : a critical anthology of two - way communication with man " . eds . t . a . sebeok & jean umiker - sebeok . ny : plenum press , 1980 . in it is chomsky 's article : " human language and other semiotic systems . " pp . 429-40 . chomsky 's article is pretty much as i remembered it , but with a great many other observations on the nature of human language , characteristic of his concept of human language , which contrast / s with what the animal psychologists of the time had taught apes ( and perhaps even thought of teaching them ) , e . g . , potentially infinite embedding of phrases within other phrases . beyond that , he challenges the notion that human language is ( merely / primarily ) a system for ( social ) communication , which serves his notion of the inappropriateness of comparing human language with animal systems of communication for drawing conclusions about the evolution of human language ( and may also imply that it is a strictly human device for interpreting external stimuli and " thinking " ) . incidentally , my rereading of the article changed my earlier impression that chomsky lacked " grace " in not explicitly acknowledging the accomplishments and discoveries of animal psychologists , to a perception that such explicitness would be irrelevant and distracting to the points he wanted to make . of course he could n't help activating involuntary visceral hostility in some researchers when he accused them of lack of logic in their arguments , but that is another matter . most interesting was his final position that regardless of what apes may prove capable of learning , he saw evidence for a qualitative distinction between the human and ape natural intellectual endowment in the fact that humans acquire most ( syntactic ) properties of language without ( even the possibility of ) explicit teaching , while apes obviously do not , despite the " evolutionary advantages " ( c 's phrase ) that it would bestow on them . i particularly liked the last sentence of the following passage : " now it is difficult to imagine that children learning english receive specific instruction about these matters , or even that they are provided with relevant experience . in fact , we find that while children make many errors in language learning , they never make such mistakes as these : they never assume , until corrected , that " the candidates wanted me to vote for each other " means that each candidate wanted me to vote for the other . in fact , relevant experience is never presented for most speakers of english , * just as no pedagogic grammar would ever point out these facts . * " p . 432 to tell the truth , i do n't get the error in the example ( maybe because i ' ve never been corrected ? ) , but i get the point . it 's the point about anaphoric reference that i mentioned in the last posting ( though i think the passage is trying to rely on some point about syntactic embedding of anaphora of the type common at the time among generativists , cf . the parallel reflexive " the candidate wanted me to vote for ? him - / herself [ unstressed ] " ) . in any case , one might argue ( i would not ) that there is an anthropocentric bias inherent in chomsky 's perspective on the " evolutionary advantage " of human language - - i would suppose stemming from what i think is the evolutionary tenet that whatever promotes indefinite increase of the population of a species is an evolutionary advantage , since that is supposed to maximise the chance that at least some of the members of the species will survive to continue the reproduction of the species . i guess an objection might be that in some sense apes " know " something that we do n't know that makes them shy away from retaining or developing something like human language , e . g . , that the technological advances allowed by human social organization and motivation facilitated by language will eventually lead to our extinction , a notion that would probably have evoked more rhetorical sympathy in the mid 1980s when fear of nuclear holocaust peaked ( or more persistently but less clearly the malthusian notion that uncontrolled human population increase puts dangerous pressure on the ecological support system ) . i doubt such an objection has any chance of being taken seriously ( in the form just given at least ) by the scientific spirit . imagine the unimaginable that some human society ( any human society ) came to this conclusion and rejected human language as ultimately threatening to the species . even so , i would guess that the innateness hypothesis would predict that humans would still not be able to " help " learning and manifesting language ( manifesting - - ) learning by future generations ) , and if that would contribute to eventual extinction , too bad . nothing in evolutionary theory prevents " defective " aberrations from arising . the species with them would simply arise and then disappear ( relatively quickly ? ) . however , i ' m sure humans are constitutionally incapable of seeing the human language faculty as such an injurious aberration - - i can't . at worst i can only see it as a possible means of salvation from the jeopardy that some of our more sinister instincts may have placed us in . forgive me for even inventing what i consider an idle and repulsive speculation - - but i think it throws in relief what might be inferred in assessing chomsky 's ultimate argument as i understand it . the simple summation of chomsky 's argument is : if apes are capable of learning " human " language , why do n't they ( do it naturally - - like people do ) ? probably more interesting and arguable to the list discussion is chomsky 's point of distinguishing " human language " and " language " . chomsky sees human language as a subject for scientific inquiry with properties which are quite specific , including the syntactic properties of reference , embedding , etc . that we are all familiar with as current linguists . in contrast , my understanding of the article is that he sees " language " as a non-scientific concept , something vague and not even promising as a potential scientific field of inquiry . in this vein , he concedes that apes and many other animals may - - in fact , he does not doubt - - make use of symbolic systems ( semiotic systems ) apparently comparable in principle to the lexical component of language in some way , though less extensive , and , if i understand , less discrete ( in the linguistic sense of " discrete " ) . and he supposes that such symbolic systems in other animals may be related to shared intellectual capacities of humans and these other animals , but that with humans they interact with distinctive linguistic capacities ( among the latter i suppose the way lexicon fills in more abstract linguistic categories in grammatical derivations ) . in an illustrative passage ( p . 437 ) he objects to the gardners ' characterisation of teaching apes to use ameslan lexical signs as teaching them ameslan as a ( human ) language . by the way , he considers acquisition of the sign for " and " as trivial , with respect to comparison with human language . i do n't suppose that that is meant to detract from recognition of the apes ' ability to grasp this " logical operation " ( by human definition ) - - but that such recognition is irrelevant to an appreciation of what is distinctive about human language ( well , at least we now know that the " logical " concept " and " is not distinctive to humans - - the concept " plural " , then , probably is n't either - - more problematic is the concept " dual " as far as i know - - have apes been taught to count ? hey ! last time i looked i had three identical rubber ducks , now i only have two ! ) . in sum , then , chomsky has a very specific and single-minded notion of human language which allows him to immediately " see through " claims about animal manifestations of " language " , just as it had earlier allowed him to criticise ( and condemn ) skinner 's notions about the " nature " of human language . i think the usual difficulty in seeing his point is not so much in the persistence of linguistic debate about whether and to what extent " autonomous syntax " is a valid notion ( let 's not get into that here ) , but in the intuitive notion among linguists , as well as everybody else , that lexicon is a major " part " of " human language " . it is certainly not the part that chomsky associates with the distinctive innate human faculty of language . rather , the innate faculty is somewhere in the systems which organise combinations of signs , that " somewhere " being crucial to whether or not there is an evolutionary discontinuity between human language and animal potentials for " language " . of course , another source of resistance to the idea of an innate human language faculty is a generalised sneaking suspicion that anything that proposes to set humans apart from other animals in a fundamental way is self-deluding anthropocentric self - aggrandising propaganda , cf . the discredited ( i think ) argument against the heliocentric theory of the solar system that humans are the " center " of creation and therefore their location must be at the pivot of the material universe . while sneaking suspicions are certainly appropriate issues to bring up for something as informal as the ling . list discussion , it is not clear to me how it fits in to more formal scientific argument . misguided as a source of resistance would be the idea floated in the kant / innate discussion that a theory that something is " innate " is a killer to further attempts at " explanation " . the killer to explanation is the " just " in " that 's just the way things are " . on the contrary , take out the " just " and there would be nothing to explain if there were no " that 's the way things are " . if we get confused about this , it 's because , as scientists we don ' t know how things are , and our " explanations " are hypotheses to test if things are the way we think they are . i forgot what the context of kant 's discussion of " explanation " was , but in the context of " pure " reason it would have to be the " just " . in " practical " reason i suppose whatever aids remembering the " facts " is sufficient " explanation " . finally , a message from massimo piattelli - palmarini , director of the dept of cognitive science at the istituto san raffaele in milan , alerted me that among the discussion of comparisons between human and ape cognition relevant to language capacity , " the truly definitive piece is by mark seidenberg and laura petitto in cognition , vol 7 , 1979 , pp . 177-215 . " although this article was published before the volume i referred to above , it was too recent for most of the papers published in that volume to fully discuss , so that there are only glancing references to it in some of the papers . i still have n't read it yet , not that i ' ve even read most of the articles in the sebeok volume . incidentally , massimo reminded me that apes were indeed found to be able to recognise their reflections in mirrors , monkeys not ( and i think i read that in roger fout 's popular book about teaching apes to communicate with humans which came out in the late 70s ) . from what i gather , animal psychologists etc . are not ( or no longer ) hostile to the idea of a discontinuity between human language and what animals are capable of , but remain ( why not ? ) interested in discovering of what animals are capable of , and what that might suggest about human evolution . benji
