Suboptimist

Revisiting cognition.

In response to Dave’s comment a couple of posts ago, I wish I could say I’m not doing any homework over the break. Unfortunately, that’s not the case at all. I’ve been planning out a follow-up to my phonetics project, which I would like to submit to the Linguistics Student Conference this year. We’ll see maybe. I’ve also been reading a lot of Chomsky and anti-Chomsky (mostly regarding the argument from the poverty of the stimulus). I guess you could say I feel stupid remaining completely agnostic about the idea that has shaped the foundation of modern theoretical linguistics, and I’m trying to be convinced one way or the other. I don’t work that way, it seems. Saying I am agnostic concerning Universal Grammar is like an physicist taking the same stance toward General Relativity. More on that in a moment.

It turns out that my sociolinguistics professor hasn’t yet posted our grades. They were due yesterday. This normally wouldn’t be a concern to me, since delayed grades are known to happen, but she hasn’t sent my letter of recommendation either. I am wondering if she is, you know, dead. If she’s dead, that sucks. You know what also sucks? Potentially being stuck in Salt Lake another year. Maybe I can make the best of it. I’ll just get another degree, or something. Hell, maybe I’ll get a real job in the interim.

Anyway, UG. Arguments for it have been entirely philosophical for decades now. It’s become accepted as a truth about human existence without any robust empirical investigation into its premises. Pullum and Scholz wrote a striking critique of various stimulus poverty arguments. One of the pieces of the classic argument from the poverty of the stimulus is that children cannot acquire various grammatical structures from positive evidence. One such example is subject-AUX inversion:

(1) You can come to my house.

(2) Can you come to my house?

(3) *Can you can come to my house?

Pullum and Scholz claim there are numerous positive examples of this, even in corpora experienced by children during early acquisition. Perhaps a hole has been found. Regardless of what you take away from the [rather lengthy] article, it’s clear that the time for philosophizing about UG, the assumption underlying all generative models of language, is over. Now it’s time for data.

Additionally, there is the case of Pirahã. Daniel Everett claims that this remote language in the Amazon lacks key elements of language which, according to various Chomskyans, are essential to the UG hypothesis. Further, culture he claims that culture constrains Pirahã language and cognition in a way previously unattested. It’s interesting, though I’m not ready to accept it. There has to be a way to judge his hypothesis experimentally. Some have claimed to try, but the Pirahã people seem to be inscrutable.