Repeat After Me
Illustration by Triboro Design
By JOHN McWHORTER - Published: April 6, 2012 - New York Times
Few linguists doubt that natural selection has played a part in humans’ linguistic ability. We all speak. Our vocal tract is honed to produce the sonic richness and precision of speech. Animals couldn’t speak even if they wanted to. In the 1960s, however, Noam Chomsky pushed the envelope with a radical proposal: a theory that humans have an innate mental apparatus specifically devoted to assembling words into sentences — an inborn “language organ.”
LANGUAGE -The Cultural ToolBy Daniel L. EverettIllustrated. 351 pp. Pantheon Books. US$27.95.
The literature on this, as intriguing as it may sound, would leave most readers alternately puzzled and drowsy. The idea is that a sentence starts in an almost unrecognizably abstract state, as a bare, treelike structure quite different from the ones some will recall from schoolroom diagraming. To say “He rolled the ball down the hill,” for example, we hang “He” from the tree and then hang a separate sentence, “The ball rolled down the hill,” a little ways over. Then “rolled” jumps left over “the ball” and lands on a hitherto empty branch. That branch’s job is to jolt a verb like “rolled” into meaning the action of “He” rather than the action of the ball. O.K. Then, for reasons even more occult, “He” does its own leftward jump, abandoning the branch where it started — although this leaves no pause after “He” when we utter the sentence.
All that to get a ball down a hill, and I left out some tricky bits. These phantom leaps make sense only with ingrown justifications that, by the year, have less and less to do with developments in psychology, biology or genetics. Yet adherents to Chomsky’s theory can be pitilessly dismissive of detractors as just not up for serious abstraction.
It is the Chomskyan take on language that Daniel L. Everett, a linguist best known for his work in the Amazon among the Pirahã, challenges in “Language: The Cultural Tool.” Chomsky argues that language is too complex, and mastered by children too quickly, for it to be a learned skill like riding a bicycle. There must be a genetic program for learning language, which as a pan-human trait should be applicable to any language a child hears. Languages seem so vastly different from one another, but for Chomskyans this is a mere matter of word shapes; in terms of how we put the words together, languages are all minor variations on a single universal grammar — the one underlying that jumping-He-on-the-tree phenomenon.