Abstract
The motivations for the claim that language is innate are, for many, quite straightforward. The innateness of language is seen as the only way to solve the so-called logical problem of language acquisition : the mismatch between linguistic input and linguistic output. In this paper, I begin by unravelling several strands of the nativist argument, offering replies as I go along. I then give an outline of Wittgenstein’s view of language acquisition , showing how it renders otiose problems posed by nativists like Chomsky —not least by means of Wittgenstein’s own brand of grammar which, unlike Chomsky’s, does not reside in the brain, but in our practices .
In memoriam Laurence Goldstein (1947–2014).
Professor of philosophy at the University of Kent, Laurence Goldstein’s work on Wittgenstein includes a book, Clear and Queer Thinking: Wittgenstein’s Development and His Relevance to Modern Thought (1999), and articles such as ‘What does “experiencing meaning” mean?’ (in The Third Wittgenstein 2004), and ‘Wittgenstein and Situation Comedy’ (Philosophia 2009). See his edited collection Brevity (Oxford University Press, 2013). Laurence was advisory editor for the 2005 Monist issue on the Philosophy of Humor. He was keenly interested in language acquisition, designed apparatus for teaching syllogistic to blind students and wrote a series of texts for teaching English to Chinese children.
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Notes
- 1.
In fact, nativists recognize that not all principles occur in every language , but claim that this does not prevent that principle from being universal as long as the principle is not broken. Indeed a principle can be claimed universal on the basis of its occurrence in a single language: ‘In what sense can a universal that does not occur in every language still be universal? Japanese does not break any of the requirements of syntactic movement; it does not need locality for question movement because question movement itself does not occur. Its absence from some aspect of a given language does not prove it is not universal. Provided that the universal is found in some human language, it does not have to be present in all languages’; ‘… it is not necessary for a universal principle to occur in dozens of languages…. it can be claimed to be universal on evidence from one language alone; ‘I have not hesitated to propose a general principle of linguistic structure on the basis of observations of a single language’ (Chomsky 1980b: 48)’ (Cook and Newson 2007: 21; 23).
- 2.
Chomsky is no longer concerned by the degeneracy of the data, but only its poverty or meagreness. The poverty of stimulus argument now focuses on the poverty of language addressed to children (the fact that it does not contain the right kind of syntactic evidence) rather than on the degeneracy of the data (the fact that it is not always completely well-formed). This change is due to research on speech addressed to children which showed that it was highly regular, and so the data are arguably not as degenerate as was earlier thought. Newport et al. (1977) found that only 1 out of 1500 utterances addressed to children was ungrammatical (Cook and Newson 2007: 192–3).
- 3.
UG is ‘the sum total of all the immutable principles that heredity builds into the language organ. These principles cover grammar, speech sounds, and meaning ’ (Chomsky 1983); they are the finite, invariant, genetically innate set of principles common to all languages ‘by which the child can infer, on the basis of the limited data available in the environment, the full grammatical capacity which we think of as a mature speaker’s knowledge of a language’ (Anderson and Lightfoot 2000: 6). UG is part of the LAD, an innate biologically endowed language faculty. The LAD is also known as the ‘initial state’ of the language faculty—the state we are born with; we have learned English (i.e. the language faculty reaches its ‘mature state’) when, by being exposed to it, we have learned the lexicon and set the parameters for English.
- 4.
This is the Principles and Parameters (P&P) Theory, according to which ‘UG provides a fixed system of principles and a finite array of finitely valued parameters’ (1995: 170). Parameters are language-specific, binary parameters that can be set in various ways. An example of a parameter is ‘the head parameter’, whereby a particular language consistently has the heads on the same side of the complements in all its phrases, whether head-first or head-last. So, for instance, English is head-first: in the house: preposition heads first before the complement; killed the man: verb heads first before the complement. Japanese is head-last. ‘It may be that the values of parameters are set to defaults at birth, but that these can be changed across a small range of values by certain linguistic experiences’ (Green and Vervaecke 1997).
- 5.
Bishop (2014) objects : ‘The problem is then to explain how children get from this abstract knowledge to the specific language they are learning . The field became encumbered by creative but highly implausible theories, most notably the parameter-setting account [see note 4 above], which conceptualized language acquisition as a process of “setting a switch” for a number of innately determined parameters’. I would, however, begin by objecting to the ‘abstract knowledge’.
- 6.
Anderson and Lightfoot: ‘the trigger experience, which varies from person to person … consists of an unorganized and fairly haphazard set of utterances, of the kind that any child hears’ (2000: 14).
- 7.
Chomsky affirms having once said that ‘the child has a repertoire of concepts as part of its biological endowment and simply has to learn that a particular concept is realized in a particular way in the language ’ and adds that ‘[w]hen you read the huge Oxford English Dictionary …, you may think that you are getting the definition of a word but you’re not. All you are getting is a few hints and then your innate knowledge is filling in all the details and you end up knowing what the word means’ (Chomsky 2000). Cook and Newson (2007) speak of a ‘computational system’ in the human mind which bridges meanings to sequences of sounds in one direction and sequences of sounds to meanings in the other. The lexicon is allegedly represented in the mind and the computational system relies on this mental lexicon.
- 8.
This paragraph is a faithful rendering of Anderson and Lightfoot (2000: 11).
- 9.
For fleshed-out arguments on this, see Hutto and Myin (2013), Glock (2013) and Hacker (2007). Hacker: ‘It is common among psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists to speak of internal representations in the brain. In so far as ‘representation’ signifies no more than a causal correlate in the brain of an external stimulus, this is innocuous. But it is evident that all too frequently it is meant to signify a symbolic representation. And it makes no sense to speak of semantic (symbolic) representations in the brain … [f]or such representations are determined by conventions’ (2007: 20–1).
- 10.
Studies in language development find that children use a wide variety of cues, including syntactic, semantic and prosodic information, to learn language structure (Bates and MacWhinney 1989). Bishop (2014): ‘Current statistical learning accounts allow us to … study the process of language learning. Instead of assuming that children start with knowledge of linguistic categories, categories are abstracted from statistical regularities in the input (see Special Issue 3, Journal of Child Language 2010, vol. 37). The units of analysis thus change as the child develops expertise. And, consistent with the earlier writings of Bates and MacWhinney (1989), children’s language is facilitated by the presence of correlated cues in the input, e.g. prosodic and phonological cues in combination with semantic context . In sharp contrast to the idea that syntax is learned by a separate modular system divorced from other information, recent research emphasizes that the young language learner uses different sources of information together. Modularity emerges as development proceeds’.
- 11.
Whereas the Chomskyan explanation here is that the regularity of such errors, and the fact that they are not based upon what the child hears, demonstrate that they are derived from the universal grammar . The child allegedly works through from the simplest possibilities offered by the UG to the more complex, until his own grammar is the same as the grammar of the mother tongue. But even if we were to grant Chomsky the occurrence of such cerebral gymnastics, how does he explain that many children go on making mistakes of this kind into adulthood? I heard a man laughing at his companion who had just used the word ‘sped’ rather than ‘speeded’ (both are right), affirming that there is no such word. And how many of us are ever sure about when to use ‘hung’ or ‘hanged’? It is bodies like the Académie Française, not UG, that legislate as to what is grammatically legitimate, and what changes are accepted, though it has a reactive rather than generative role—the evolution of language being mostly the spontaneous upshot of language users. As Ramscar, Dye & McCauley have found: ‘children’s overregularization errors both arise and resolve themselves as a consequence of the distribution of error in the linguistic environment, and … far from presenting a logical puzzle for learning , they are inevitable consequences of it’ (2013: 760).
- 12.
Ramscar and Yarlett (2007) and Ramscar et al. (2013) show the importance of expectation and error-driven learning processes in language acquisition . For example , when children erroneously expect an ungrammatical form that then never occurs, the repeated absence of fulfilment serves as a kind of implicit negative feedback which encourages them to correct their errors over time.
- 13.
MacWhinney (1993) shows that language acquisition includes a ‘rich armoury of learning mechanisms’—including expressive and receptive monitoring, alongside competition, conservatism , complex, indirect and overt negative evidence, and cue construction—indicating that ‘the logical problem of language learning is easily solved, and that there is really no logical problem of language acquisition at all’.
- 14.
Moerk (1994) conducted a meta-analysis of 40 studies and found substantial evidence that corrections do indeed play a role, and that they are not only abundant but contingent on the mistakes of the child. Schoneberger (2010) cites findings that evidence (both positive and negative) available in the linguistic environment provides adequate constraints when learning a language. For example , children are provided positive evidence (a) when their grammatically correct utterances are directly reinforced by adults; (b) when their grammatically correct utterances are indirectly reinforced by adults by means of automatic reinforcement; and (c) when adults provide grammatically correct exemplars. Further, they are provided direct negative evidence when their grammatically incorrect utterances result in corrective feedback as well as indirect negative evidence by usually not being exposed to grammatically incorrect utterances. They also cite evidence to support the claim that reinforcement promotes language acquisition during naturally occurring parent–child verbal interactions .
- 15.
There are of course many well-documented examples of this, such as changes in the grammar of Old English to that of Chaucer’s Middle English.
- 16.
Pidgins are basic or proto-languages developed as a means of communication by adults who do not share a common language. They are syntactically impoverished languages, characterized by reduced syntax and vocabulary, no fixed order of words, with considerable variation from one speaker to another. However, a pidgin can evolve into a creole, which is a full-blown language. The argument here is that inasmuch as a full-blown language can be developed from an impoverished linguistic environment (with only vocabulary, but not grammatical principles drawn from a pidgin inasmuch as pidgins do not possess such principles in the first place), principles must be innate.
- 17.
The transition occurs progressively. It is only in the second generation that pidgin is established, by speakers who have retained some of their native language . It is this stable and developed form of pidgin, constructed by the second generation, which gives birth to creole. The Hudson-Kam and Newport (2009) experiments mentioned earlier also suggest that creole languages do not support a universal grammar . In a pidgin situation (as also in the real-life situation of a deaf child whose parents were disfluent signers), children systematize the language they hear based on the probability and frequency of forms, and not on the basis of a universal grammar .
- 18.
I cannot expand on this here but the literature is abundant—the cases of Victor and Genie being the most notable. In Genie’s case, psychological and physical trauma was caused by her father who physically punished her if she made any sounds (Curtiss et al. 1974: 84). As for Victor, he presented insensitivity to any feelings except joy and anger (e.g. he never cried; his eyes were without expression); he was virtually insensitive to noise and his sensitivity to temperature was different from the norm (e.g. he did not react to boiling water); he was unable to distinguish between a painting and an object in relief, and could not undertake mundane tasks like opening a door. See Singleton and Ryan (2004) against the validity of feral cases in support of the SLI hypothesis.
- 19.
Views that espouse some universality do not need to appeal to nativism : Christiansen and Chater (2008) hold a non-formal conception of universals in which these emerge.
- 20.
This is echoed by Christiansen and Chater (2008) whose research finds that it is non-linguistic constraints that have shaped language to the brain, and given rise to statistical tendencies in language structure and use. The question is not ‘Why is the brain so well suited to learning language?’, but ‘Why is language so well suited to being learned by the brain?’ Following Darwin, they argue that ‘it is useful metaphorically to view languages as ‘organisms’—that is, highly complex systems of interconnected constraints—that have evolved in a symbiotic relationship with humans’ (2008: 490).
- 21.
This view of the sudden appearance of language as a kind of evolutionary accident where humans, to the exclusion of all other animals, were somehow accidentally blessed with a fully functioning prefabricated language organ (see Chomsky 1988) has been found, Green and Vervaecke (1997) concede, hardly plausible. However, they retort: ‘ironically, … the real Big Bang theory is, as far as we now know, true! A substantial critique of the implausibility of ‘catastrophic’ or ‘big bang’ theories of brain evolution to account for humans’ unique linguistic capacity can be found in Deacon (1997).
- 22.
Following convention, titles for Wittgenstein's works are abbreviated (TLP = Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, BB = The Blue and Brown Books (Preliminary Notebooks), Z = Zettel, OC = On Certainty, RFM = Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, N = Notebooks, RPP I = Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology I, RPP II = Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology II, LPP = Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, PO I = Philosophical Occasions I, PO II = Philosophical Occasions II, PI = Philosophical Investigations, WL = Wittgenstein’s Lectures, BT = The Big Typescript), with section (§) or page number (p.), with full citation and initials (e.g., RFM) in the References.
- 23.
Chomsky is averse to saying that language acquisition is a learning at all; it is, to him, more akin to growing than to learning: ‘In certain fundamental respects we do not really learn language ; rather grammar grows in the mind’ (Chomsky 1980a: 134); ‘language development really ought to be called language growth because the language organ grows like any other body organ’ (1983). Cook and Newson: ‘Acquisition of language is, to Chomsky , learning in a peculiar sense: … it is not like learning to ride a bicycle, where practice develops and adapts existing skills . Instead it is internal development in response to vital, but comparatively trivial, experience from outside’ (2007: 185).
- 24.
For an aperçu of Wittgenstein’s impact in the field of language acquisition , see Nelson (2009).
- 25.
‘Being sure that someone is in pain, doubting whether he is, and so on, are so many natural , instinctive kinds of behaviour towards other human beings, and our language is merely an auxiliary to, and further extension of, this relation. Our language-game is an extension of primitive behaviour.’ (Z §545). ‘What, however, is the word “primitive” meant to say here? Presumably, that the mode of behaviour is pre-linguistic: that a language game is based on it: that it is the prototype of a mode of thought and not the result of thought.’ (RPP I, §916). Wittgenstein (RPP II) speaks of primitive or animal behaviour in the phylogenetic as well as the ontogenetic sense. Here is an illustration of the phylogenetic primitivity of our concepts: ‘(An ape who tears apart a cigarette, for example . We don’t see an intelligent dog do such things. The mere act of turning an object all around and looking it over is a primitive root of doubt’ (RPP II, §345).
- 26.
Wittgenstein : ‘it is characteristic of our language that the foundation on which it grows consists in steady ways of living, regular ways of acting’ (PO I, p. 397; my emphasis). Our acquiring concepts, such as pain, requires that we have appropriate (i.e. normal) human reactions : ‘If a child looked radiant when it was hurt, and shrieked for no apparent reason, one could not teach him to use the word “pain”’ (LPP, p. 37).
- 27.
On Philippe Narboux’ view, training is a necessary but insufficient condition for the learning of a native language whereas second language acquisition does not require it, and can rely on nothing other than ostensive definition because it relies on previous training (2004: 136).
- 28.
Once the child has some language , there will be more explanatory teaching , and perhaps the odd transmission of some linguistic principles (though not usually of the ‘clitic’ sort). Wittgenstein talks about teaching as well as training : (e.g. Z §§318 & 186).
- 29.
Cf. Medina (2002: 173). As psychologist Derek Montgomery also observes, if the carer repeatedly uses the verb ‘want’ while interpreting the infant’s behaviour in certain contexts , it is ‘reasonable to suspect that when the verb emerges in the child’s lexicon it will be in familiar contexts such as [those] where the child has repeatedly heard it being used. The meaning of the term, like the meaning of the prelinguistic gesturing, is bound up in the role it plays within such contexts ’ (2002: 372).
- 30.
‘Our children are not only given practice in calculation but are also trained to adopt a particular attitude towards a mistake in calculating [variant: ‘… towards a departure from the norm’] (RFM: VII 61, p. 425)—that is, children are habituated into standards of correctness of the practice in question, and thereby formed to act and react in particular ways; they are thus trained to master a technique.
- 31.
For Chomsky , in contrast, our words are informed by the brain; they get their meaning from internal meanings (which are abstract mental representations), and it is the brain that communicates meaning: the human mind bridges the gap between external sounds and internal meanings (which are abstract mental representations) via a ‘computational system’ that relates meanings to sequences of sounds in one direction and sequences of sounds to meanings in the mind in the other. The mind changes the representation of language used by the computational system into the general concepts used by the mind, called ‘the conceptual–intentional system’, i.e. moon is connected to the concept of ‘earth’s satellite’. Going in the opposite direction, while speaking the mind has to convert the concepts into linguistic representation for the computational system, i.e. ‘earth’s satellite’ is converted into moon (Cook and Newson 2007: 6). In contrast to this mentalist view, for Wittgenstein (echoed here by Montgomery), it is in social practices that the meaning of words and the standards for their use are established. Meaning , as Wittgenstein says, is ‘in use’—out there—not in the head, not in some mental repository.
- 32.
Wittgenstein’s rule-following argument shows precisely that generating new sentences is nothing but an instance of knowing how to go on, ‘how to extend the speech that [we] have into new contexts ’ (Bruner 1983: 39). As H.-J. Glock notes, the early Wittgenstein’s was also concerned with what is now known as the problem of ‘the creativity of language ’: the number of propositions being indefinite although the number of words is finite (N, p. 98; TLP §§4.02, 4.027 etc.) (1996: 298).
- 33.
Actually, the deeper confusion here is that unless we assume that language is innate, exposure to English would have to result in the child, the rabbit and the rock learning English. As Wittgenstein said: ‘If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it’ (PI, p. 223), for he wouldn’t—couldn’t—speak ‘human’. Learning humans speak (e.g., English) takes enculturation in a human form of life, and that presupposes shared behavioural reactions and responses. I won’t even bother about the rock …
- 34.
Hinzen: ‘… controversies about UG abound and the enterprise is widely rejected as ill-conceived and unfounded’ (2012a: 335n).
- 35.
Wittgenstein (PO II) does not think his conception of grammar contrasts with the grammarian’s; he insists that ‘any explanation of the use of language ’ is ‘grammar’ (PO II, p. 69). On his view, ‘A rod has no length’ is as ungrammatical as ‘A rod length has’; but as he concedes (to Moore ), the former violation of grammar is of interest only to the philosopher (ibid.), whereas syntax—albeit also part of grammar—is not the part philosophers are interested in. Wittgenstein leaves it to grammarians to bring out the syntactic aspect of use. Grammarians and philosophers may find it of interest to map grammatical rules , but this does not make the apprehension of rules as such relevant to language acquisition . In picking up the correct syntactico-semantic use of language—its grammar—the child is not picking up rules as such, but simply, to repeat: correct use.
- 36.
- 37.
I owe this expression to Bernard Harrison (1991: 58).
- 38.
‘That is, we are interested in the fact that about certain empirical propositions no doubt can exist if making judgments is to be possible at all. Or again: I am inclined to believe that not everything that has the form of an empirical proposition is one.’ (OC §308).
- 39.
Note: conditioned, not justified by facts or inferred from them. This is what precludes their being empirical propositions . Rules are not empirically or epistemically grounded in reality, though they may be ‘caused’ by reality (OC §§131, 429, 474). This is why Wittgenstein writes: ‘The rule we lay down is the one most strongly suggested by the facts of experience’ (WL: 84). For clarification regarding the nonempirical nature of ‘thick’ rules of grammar, see Moyal-Sharrock (2013).
- 40.
Some people may hold beliefs that seem to violate—and so could not condition—universal rules of grammar. For example , in the Trobriand Islands, some women, called Yoyova or flying witches, are believed to have the capacity to fly. It is, however, also (accommodatingly) believed that they either leave their bodies behind when they do this, or have doubles in the form of fireflies, etc. fly for them (1979, Young: 207). The universal rule of grammar: ‘Human beings cannot fly unaided’ is therefore not actually transgressed. Any attempt to ignore or transgress it in action—such as a yoyova attempting to actually fly off a cliff (without ‘leaving her body behind’)—must be seen as pathological. For any local belief that seems to violate universal rules of grammar, such accommodating measures will always be found. There is no normal transgression of a universal rule. To genuinely think or act on the basis of such rules of thought as—‘I can fly unaided’ or ‘Only I exist’ is a pathological problem, not a doxastic option. See Moyal-Sharrock (2007) for a discussion of local and universal rules of grammar drawn from On Certainty .
- 41.
They are conditioned by ‘extremely general facts of nature —such facts as are hardly ever mentioned because of their great generality’ (PI, p. 56)—including the ‘common behaviour of mankind’—behaviours such as breathing, eating, walking, hoping, dying, speaking, thinking, giving orders, asking questions, telling stories, having a chat. It is this common behaviour that constitutes the universal ‘system of reference’ which conditions what might be called, though in obvious contrast to Chomsky , the ‘universal grammar ’ of mankind—that grammar by means of which any human being can understand a foreign language (PI §206).
- 42.
As Vyvyen Evans testifies, Chomsky’s views are ‘established fact in many of the linguistics textbooks currently in use in many of the stellar universities throughout the English-speaking world. I was trained using these textbooks, and they are still compulsory reading for today’s undergraduate and graduate students—tomorrow’s researchers, educators and language professionals—even at the university where I teach and work. University students are regularly told that there is a universal grammar , that language is innate, that language is incommensurable with non-human communication systems, and that all languages are essentially English-like’ (2014: 19–20).
- 43.
That it is necessary to have a well-functioning brain to achieve language acquisition does not make the brain the locus of language acquisition—or part of it, a ‘language organ’. The brain is a mere mechanical enabler: its proper functioning is necessary to our acquiring and using language in the same way it is necessary to our ability to walk or digest—without it implying the existence of walking and digestion organs in the brain.
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Moyal-Sharrock, D. (2017). Universal Grammar: Wittgenstein Versus Chomsky. In: Peters, M., Stickney, J. (eds) A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3136-6_38
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