Review essay on: B. MACWHINNEY (ed.), The emergence of language.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999.
An old joke that has been circulating for the past decade or so goes as follows:
a biologist, a physicist, and a cognitive scientist were sitting around
discussing the great achievements of their fields. The biologist waxed
eloquent about the insights of Darwin's theory of evolution; the physicist
expounded on the implications of Einstein's theory of general relativity.
Then the cognitive scientist spoke up: ‘Our great discovery is the thermos.
You put a cold drink in, the drink stays cold. You fill it with hot soup, the
soup stays hot. This is amazing, for how does the thermos know?’
Obviously, this cognitive scientist has asked the wrong question about how
the thermos maintains temperatures. In The emergence of language (henceforth,
EL), an edited collection of chapters authored by an interdisciplinary
group of computer scientists, linguists, and cognitive and developmental
psychologists, it is suggested that perhaps language acquisition researchers
have been making the same mistake as the errant cognitive scientist. To be
sure, language is an extremely complex phenomenon, yet it is also elegant.
Recognition of these characteristics in all aspects of language (thanks in large
part to Chomskyan approaches to linguistics) highlights a well-known
apparent paradox: language is hopelessly complex but children acquire it
with ease. Solutions to this paradox have typically inspired researchers to
posit rules or other kinds of blueprints – knowledge (innate or acquired) that
children have to guide their language acquisition. But are these rules truly
necessary? Perhaps children do not KNOW how to acquire language any more
than a thermos knows how to maintain temperature.