Language: The Cultural Tool

“Few linguists doubt that natural selection has played a part in humans’ linguistic ability. We all speak. Animals couldn’t speak even if they wanted to. In the 1960s, however, Noam Chomsky pushed a theory that humans have an innate mental apparatus specifically devoted to assembling words into sentences — an inborn “language organ.”

A sentence starts in an abstract state, as a bare, treelike structure. 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”. Then “rolled” jumps left lands on an empty branch. That branch’s job is to jolt a verb like “rolled” into meaning the action of “He”. “He” does its own leftward jump, abandoning the branch where it started. These phantom leaps make sense only with ingrown justifications that have little to do with developments in psychology, biology or genetics.

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. Languages seem different from one another, but 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.

It is the Chomskyan take on language that the linguist Everett challenges in “Language: The Cultural Tool.” 50 years after, there is still no serious evidence for a universal grammar. Everett aptly quotes the psycholinguist Tomasello’s judgment — “Universal grammar is dead” — and adds: “It was a good idea. It didn’t pan out.”

How humans learn language is much more accounted for by psychologists than the Chomskyans. Our brains and bodies have evolved to optimize our language abilities. Everett believes that language is a combination of three elements: “Cognition + Culture + Communication.”

The book “Language: The Cultural Tool” is based on Everett’s years with the Pirahã people in the Amazon region. Everett emphasizes the “Culture” component. Of course culture shapes language. Indigenous languages often specify things in relation to mountains and rivers, with a precision linked to the environment the language is spoken in. These arguments can be attractive, as cultural diversity is always interesting — some languages drift into marking things that others don’t. In French, the verb sortir is used to describe leaving, sticking out your tongue and being pulled out of a hole. Are the French somehow less culturally sensitive to the differences among those things than the British, or anyone else?

Everett acknowledges that culture and language do not walk in lock step. Everett finds culture the sexiest part of language. The He-jumping paradigm is based on the portion of language that has nothing to do with culture, but on the universalities of cognition. Still, “Language” is a useful study of a burgeoning theory compatible with Darwinism, anthropology, psychology and philosophy. One need not subscribe to the idea of grammar as a reflection of “values”. (Based on: McWhorte)

Ex. 7 Answer the questions in writing:

ü What are the major approaches to the origins of human languages?

ü What is your stand point regarding the topic? Explain and give examples.