The Ultimate Test

I got a letter the other day that presented a theory of language my correspondent wanted me to consider. Regrettably, I doubted his idea could be accomplished by plain old evolution and I told him that I cannot take seriously any account of language that requires a miraculous beginning.Years ago I read Stephen Pinker ’s famous bookThe Language Instinct. Pinker is a gifted writer and his book is filled with interesting and entertaining facts, but I could never persuade myself to even consider  his account of how language works. His system requires a set of modules in the brain for generating sentences. If language had been evolving for 15 or 20 million years I might have said OK, but we have had nowhere near enough time to evolve and perfect the linguistic modules Pinker talks about.Back in 1970 it struck me that evolution had played an important part in language origins and ever since that time I have required ideas about language origins to make evolutionary sense. So naturally I was delighted when readingDaniel Dor ’s chapter, “The Evolution of Language and Its Speakers,” inThe Instruction of Imagination, I came across this passage:The question of the evolution of language … [is] the most crucial bottleneck that any theory oflanguage should be able to squeeze through …. For every theory of language we should thus ask: how is thisevolvable? [p. 184]What makes a language evolvable?First, language should be adaptive; it should solve some problem. This may seem lik...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: blogs