Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T08:14:31.597Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Why and how the problem of the evolution of Universal Grammar (UG) is hard1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

Stevan Harnad
Stevan Harnad
Affiliation:
Chaire de Recherche du Canada, Institut des Sciences Cognitives, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, H3C 3P8, Canada; and Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom. http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/[email protected]://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Christiansen & Chater (C&C) suggest that language is an organism, like us, and that our brains were not selected for Universal Grammar (UG) capacity; rather, languages were selected for learnability with minimal trial-and-error experience by our brains. This explanation is circular: Where did our brain's selective capacity to learn all and only UG-compliant languages come from?

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 31 , Issue 5 , October 2008 , pp. 524 - 525
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Cangelosi, A. & Harnad, S. (2001) The adaptive advantage of symbolic theft over sensorimotor toil: Grounding language in perceptual categories. Evolution of Communication 4(1):117–42. Available at: http://cogprints.org/2036/.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N. (2005a) Some simple evo-devo theses: How true might they be for language? Paper presented at the Alice V. and David H. Morris Symposium on Language and Communication: The Evolution of Language, Stony Brook University, New York, October 14, 2005. Available at: http://www.linguistics.stonybrook.edu/events/nyct05/abstracts/Chomsky.pdf.Google Scholar
Harnad, S. (1976) Induction, evolution and accountability. In: Origins and evolution of language and speech, ed. Harnad, S., Steklis, H. D. & Lancaster, J. B., pp. 58–60. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Available at: http://cogprints.org/0863.Google Scholar
Harnad, S. (2005) To cognize is to categorize: Cognition is categorization. In: Handbook of categorization, ed. Lefebvre, C. & Cohen, H.. Elsevier. Available at: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11725/.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harnad, S. (2007) From knowing how to knowing that: Acquiring categories by word of mouth. Paper presented at the Kaziemierz Naturalized Epistemology Workshop (KNEW), Kaziemierz, Poland, September 2, 2007. Available at: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14517/.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. & Bloom, P. (1990) Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13:707–27; discussion 727–84. Available at: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/OldArchive/bbs.pinker.html.CrossRefGoogle Scholar