language parallax

Just found this New Yorker article (via Daily Kos) about the language of the Pirahã. There’s a lot in the article about the debate about the presence of recursion in the language, and what that says about Chomsky’s Universal Grammar.

This passage seems to be the core of the story:

Contemporary linguists have generally avoided speculation about how humans acquired language in the first place. Chomsky himself has long demonstrated a lack of interest in language origins and expressed doubt about Darwinian explanations. “It is perfectly safe to attribute this development to ‘natural selection,’ ” Chomsky has written, “so long as we realize that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena.” Moreover, Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, which was widely understood to portray language as a complex system that arose fully formed in the brain, discouraged inquiry into how language developed. “This totally slams the door on the question,” Brent Berlin, a cognitive anthropologist at the University of Georgia, told me. “It acts as if, in some inexplicable way, almost mysteriously, language is hermetically sealed from the conditions of life of the people who use it to communicate. But this is not some kind of an abstract, beautiful, mathematical, symbolic system that is not related to real life.”

Berlin believes that Pirahã may provide a snapshot of language at an earlier stage of syntactic development. “That’s what Dan’s work suggests,” Berlin said of Everett’s paper. “The plausible scenarios that we can imagine are ones that would suggest that early language looks something like the kind of thing that Pirahã looks like now.”