For almost half a century, the dominant theory in language acquisition has been Noah Chomsky’s “Universal Grammar,” which holds that people are born with a rudimentary body of grammatical knowledge written into the human DNA—an instinct hardwired in their brain that works on all languages everywhere in the world. This theory was popularized by Steven Pinker in his book
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language and several other works. Now, on the basis of new evidence gathered in recent years, a British linguist in the United Kingdom deems Universal Grammar a myth—“simple, powerful and completely wrong.”
In his recently released book
The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct (Cambridge University Press, 314 pages), Vyvyan Evans, professor of linguistics at Bangor University in Wales, UK, says that Chomsky’s theory unfortunately doesn’t stand up to more recent findings in the field of developmental psycholinguistics. On the contrary, Evans points out, language acquisition by children in various cultures and countries has been clearly demonstrated to arise from a painstaking process of trial and error.
“Children appear to pick up their grammar in quite a piecemeal way,” Evans says. “For instance, focusing on the use of the English article system, for a long time they will apply a particular article (e.g., ‘the’) only to those nouns to which they have heard it applied before. It is only later that children expand upon what they’ve heard, gradually applying articles to a wider set of nouns… Rules don’t get applied in indiscriminate jumps, as we would expect if there really was an innate blueprint for grammar. We seem to construct our language by spotting patterns in the linguistic behaviour we encounter, not by applying built-in rules.”
Says Michael Fortescue, professor emeritus at the University of Copenhagen: “Evans’ rebuttal of Chomsky’s universal grammar from the perspective of cognitive linguistics provides an excellent antidote to popular textbooks where it is assumed that the Chomskyan approach to linguistic theory (in one avatar or another) has somehow been vindicated once and for all."
Read Vyvyan Evan’s “Real Talk” in the Aeon.co webmagazine now!Read Alun Anderson's "Why language is neither an instinct nor innate," a review of Evan's book in the New Scientist now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Vyvyan Evans is professor of linguistics in the School of Linguistics & English Language at Bangor University, UK. He received his PhD in Linguistics from Georgetown University in 2000. He has written numerous research monographs, textbooks, edited volumes and works of reference. The current president of the UK Cognitive Linguistics Association and general editor for the journal
Language and Cognition, Evans writes about cognitive linguistics and does specialized research on the domains of space and time, lexical and compositional semantics, as well as figurative language and abstract thought.
OTHER INTERESTING READINGS:Call it quits or what? In “‘Fewer’ Or ‘Less?’ The Express Lane Language Debate,” an article that came out in the December 6, 2014 issue of the
NPR.org website, Mark Memmott reports on how an admittedly unscientific question he posed online indicates that the “or less” crowd outnumbers the “or fewer” folks, based on feedback from 8,390 respondents.
Memmott asks: “Should the majority rule?” or should this matter be kept open for further debate?
Read Mark Memmott’s “‘Fewer’ Or ‘Less?’ The Express Lane Language Debate” in NPR.com now!Texting shorthands galore. In “28 Internet acronyms every parent should know,” CNN’s Kelly Wallace says in a report datelined December 8, 2014 that young people have come up with more and more texting shorthands in even more cryptic ways. She asks: Any idea what, for starters, “IWSN,” “GNOC,” and “NIFOC” stand for?
Read Kelly Wallace’s “28 Internet acronyms every parent should know” in CNN.com now!
