It’s been a while since I read any of Chomsky’s writings on linguistics. As is well known, he blew apart the old behaviourist model of language acquisition with his review of Skinner’s book “Verbal Behaviour” back in 1959. There must, he argued, be an innate linguistic competence, as the poverty of a child’s experience of language is in marked contrast to the complexity of the acquired linguistic ability. The battle was won and the Chomskian model has been the dominant paradigm in linguistics ever since.
Chomsky has never shown much interest in the evolution of linguistic competence. It was a reasonable approach for him to take in the sense that origins were not what he was interested in and wouldn’t help the business of untangling the actual inner workings of language, but it seems like what was originally a methodological decision to take innate linguistic competence as a given became a fact about the world, such that linguistic competence was beyond the reach of the usual Darwinian evolutionary logic. [I tried to argue here that this switch from methodology to ontology was something to be found in his political writings as well: an appropriate methodology for an American of concentrating solely on US sins turned into a world where the only sins were American sins.]
So where are we now? Carl Zimmer has posted the first of two articles on language on his website, and it gives those of us who aren’t prepared (or equipped) to wade through the professional journals as good an overview as we’re likely to get. On one side we have Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct) and Paul Bloom (Descartes Baby) arguing for the importance of evolutionary pressures for the development of language: against them there’s the Chomsky faction who argue that language may just be some sort of evolutionary side-effect (a “spandrel” in Stephen Jay Gould’s terms), or that nearly all the elements for linguistic competence are present in other animals, and all it needed in humans was a little extra something, like recursion. The latest article from Pinker, with Ray Jackendoff, is according to Zimmer an all-out attack on Chomsky’s recent writings, which, they hint, have a creationist ring to them.
Zimmer promises some sort of resolution in his second post. Should be interesting.
Mick Hartley 
Leave a reply to Dom Cancel reply