Julie Sedivy - The Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist (via Nautilus)

This is a very interesting article from Julie Sedivy at Nautilus that riffs on another article from Nautilus, by Elizabeth Svoboda, The Family That Couldn’t Say Hippopotamus. The latter article presents recent genetic research that weakens (at best) or refutes (at worst) Noam Chomsky's universal grammar hypothesis (which, aside from Geoffrey Sampson, George Lakoff, and Daniel Everett, among some others, is nearly universally accepted).

[As an aside, feral children also stand as refutation of this theory - if they are not found early enough, they seem to never fully grasp human language.]

The article below looks at one specific language that defies much of our thinking about language and linguistics.

Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a new sign language emerging in a village with high rates of inherited deafness in Israel’s Negev Desert. According to a report led by Wendy Sandler of the University of Haifa, words in this language correspond to holistic gestures, much like the imaginary sound-based language described above, even though ABSL has a sizable vocabulary.

. . . ABSL contrasts sharply with other sign languages like American Sign Language (ASL), which creates words by re-combining a small collection of gestural elements such as hand shapes, movements, and hand positions.

Very interesting, and equally very cool to see a new language developing with its own internal logic and which makes us question what we know about how language forms and operates.

The Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

Posted By Julie Sedivy on Sept 22, 2014

 

In most languages, sounds can be re-arranged into any number of combinations. Not so in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language. Brian Goodman via Shutterstock 

Languages, like human bodies, come in a variety of shapes—but only to a point. Just as people don’t sprout multiple heads, languages tend to veer away from certain forms that might spring from an imaginative mind. For example, one core property of human languages is known as duality of patterning: meaningful linguistic units (such as words) break down into smaller meaningless units (sounds), so that the words sap, pass, and asp involve different combinations of the same sounds, even though their meanings are completely unrelated.

It’s not hard to imagine that things could have been otherwise. In principle, we could have a language in which sounds relate holistically to their meanings—a high-pitched yowl might mean “finger,” a guttural purr might mean “dark,” a yodel might mean “broccoli,” and so on. But there are stark advantages to duality of patterning. Try inventing a lexicon of tens of thousands of distinct noises, all of which are easily distinguished, and you will probably find yourself wishing you could simply re-use a few snippets of sound in varying arrangements.

As noted by Elizabeth Svoboda in the current issue of Nautilus, the dominant thinking until fairly recently was that universal linguistic properties reflect genetic predispositions. Under this view, duality of patterning is much like an opposable thumb: It evolved within our species because it was advantageous, and now exists as part of our genetic heritage. We are born expecting language to have duality of patterning.

What to make, then, of the recent discovery of a language whose words are not made from smaller, meaningless units? Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a new sign language emerging in a village with high rates of inherited deafness in Israel’s Negev Desert. According to a report led by Wendy Sandler of the University of Haifa, words in this language correspond to holistic gestures, much like the imaginary sound-based language described above, even though ABSL has a sizable vocabulary.

To linguists, this is akin to finding a planet on which matter is made up of molecules that don’t decompose into atoms. ABSL contrasts sharply with other sign languages like American Sign Language (ASL), which creates words by re-combining a small collection of gestural elements such as hand shapes, movements, and hand positions.

The documentary Voices From El-Sayed considered what would happen to the village when children living there started receiving cochlear implants.

ABSL provides fodder for researchers who reject the idea that there’s a genetic basis for the similarities found across languages. Instead, they argue, languages share certain properties because they all have to solve similar problems of communication under similar pressures, pressures that reflect the limits of human abilities to learn, remember, produce, and perceive information. The challenge, then, is to explain why ABSL is an outlier—if duality of patterning is the optimal solution to the problem of creating a large but manageable collection of words, why hasn’t ABSL made use of it?

One possible explanation is that the vocabulary of ABSL hasn’t yet reached a critical mass that would force it into a more combinatorial system for word-creation. This doesn’t look like the full story though. In a study by Tessa Verhoef of the University of Amsterdam, people tried to reproduce a mere 12 sounds of a “language” produced on a slide whistle. Each person’s attempts to replicate the language served as the new version of the language to be learned by the next subject, so that each new learner represented a “generation” in the life of the language. Over just 10 “generations,” learners began to change the original sounds to involve combined sequences of smaller sound patterns. The later iterations of the language were easier to learn than the original holistic sounds, suggesting there’s a learning advantage to breaking down even a very small number of complex sounds into smaller ingredients. In some cases, at least, duality of patterning kicks in at a surprisingly small number of “words.”

The signs of ABSL, though, may be easier to learn because many of them are concretely related to the things they symbolize—for example, the sign for “lemon” resembles the motion of squeezing a lemon. Another lab study led by Gareth Roberts of Yeshiva University found that both large vocabularies and abstract (as opposed to concrete) symbols encouraged the birth of duality of patterning in artificial languages. Concreteness may be easier to achieve in a gestural language than an auditory one, simply because you can illustrate more ideas using your hands than by making sounds with your mouth.

Researchers don’t yet have a clear answer for why ABSL looks as it does, but systematic lab studies may help solve this puzzle, as may the evolution of ABSL itself; Sandler and her colleagues see hints that ABSL is on the cusp of evolving a more combinatorial system. This intriguing language and the research it inspires may eventually tell us something profound about how languages emerge from the human mind, and why so many of them share some important similarities.

~ Julie Sedivy teaches at the University of Calgary. She is the author of Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics and the co-author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You.

Noam Chomsky - Language and the Mind Revisited - The Biolinguistic Turn

This is an old lecture by linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky (professor at MIT) given at UC Berkeley in 2003. For that evening in the Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lecture series, Chomsky examined biolinguistics - the study of relations between physiology and speech.

A second video of Chomsky is featured below, which is the second half of this talk. Fair warning - this is not easy material - Chomsky is speaking to people who are well-versed in this field.

Chomsky has been one the most influential scholars over the last three or four decades - between 1980 and 1992, he was cited as a source more than any other living scholar, and ranked eighth overall.

As background for this lecture, Wikipedia offers a good summary of his influence in linguistics (below the video).

Chomskyan Linguistics

Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his Syntactic Structures, a distillation of his Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75), challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar. This approach takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a context-free grammar extended with transformational rules.

Perhaps his most influential and time-tested contribution to the field, is the claim that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" or "creativity" of language. In other words, a formal grammar of a language can explain the ability of a hearer-speaker to produce and interpret an infinite number of utterances, including novel ones, with a limited set of grammatical rules and a finite set of terms. He has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar although it is also related to rationalist ideas of a priori knowledge.

It is a popular misconception that Chomsky proved that language is entirely innate and discovered a "universal grammar" (UG). In fact, Chomsky simply observed that while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human child will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky labeled whatever the relevant capacity the human has which the cat lacks the "language acquisition device" (LAD) and suggested that one of the tasks for linguistics should be to figure out what the LAD is and what constraints it puts on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that would result from these constraints are often termed "universal grammar" or UG.^[35]

The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P)—developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB)—makes strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.

Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.

More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters," Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.

Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers of the language acquisition in children, though many researchers in this area such as Elizabeth Bates^[36] and Michael Tomasello^[37] argue very strongly against Chomsky's theories, and instead advocate emergentist or connectionist theories, explaining language with a number of general processing mechanisms in the brain that interact with the extensive and complex social environment in which language is used and learned.

His best-known work in phonology is The Sound Pattern of English (1968), written with Morris Halle (and often known as simply SPE). This work has had a great significance for the development in the field. While phonological theory has since moved beyond "SPE phonology" in many important respects, the SPE system is considered the precursor of some of the most influential phonological theories today, including autosegmental phonology, lexical phonology and optimality theory. Chomsky no longer publishes on phonology.