The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (33 page)

Indeed, though Chomsky has thrown out this possibility on a number of occasions—and although he is interpreted by many as saying that this is why language evolved—on other occasions he has qualified it further. In 2000 he wrote, “One can devise equally meritorious (that is, equally pointless) tales of advantage conferred by a small series of mutations that facilitated planning and clarification of thought…not that I am proposing this or any other story.”
⁷

Chomsky’s focus on extraorganic principles and the idea that we just don’t know what happens when you pack that many neurons into a space that size is an important part of the debate. Recently a number of mathematicians at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York announced that they had worked out the mathematical basis for why the brain is divided into white matter and gray matter.
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This is exactly the kind of idea that Chomsky has been promoting since the 1970s.

Still, the way Chomsky carved up the linguistic universe is unacceptable to many researchers in language evolution. Even Ray Jackendoff proposes dismantling the long-standing Chomskyan ideas that the complexity of language arises out of the complexity of syntax and that syntax is central to language. Many researchers over the years took extremely seriously the idea that syntax was autonomous and somehow preexisted everything else in language. Gallons of ink have been spilled in the attempt to build models of a language processor that contains a separate syntactic processor, which analyzes the abstract structure of spoken language even before the sound. But, says Jackendoff, it’s time for this to be discarded.

Typically, Chomsky has been ambiguous, enlightening, and dismissive of the new ideas about the emergence of language. For example, Terrence Deacon’s book
The Symbolic Species
was received with admiration by many in the field. Chomsky, on the other hand, wrote, “I have no idea what this means.” Deacon’s account of linguistics, according to Chomsky, is “unrecognizable.” He concluded: “I do not recommend this course either; in fact could not, because I do not understand it.”
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One striking effect of the paper that Chomsky co-wrote with Hauser and Fitch was that it seemed to make other researchers in the field even more sensitive to, and critical of, Chomsky’s vast influence. Derek Bickerton, who years before had written that nothing really happened in linguistics before Chomsky, wrote about the Stony Brook conference on his blog:

 

On October 14, 2005, Chomsky disembarked on Long Island for one of the few conferences he has attended in the last several decades: the Morris Symposium on the Evolution of Language at S.U.N.Y., Stony Brook. He arrived too late for any of the presentations given by other scholars on that date, gave his public lecture, gave his conference presentation at the commencement of the next morning’s session, and, despite the fact that all of the morning’s speakers and commentators were expected to show up for a general discussion at the end of that session, left immediately for the ferry back without having attended a single talk by another speaker. For me, and for numerous others who attended the symposium, this showed a lack of respect for everyone involved. It spelled out in unmistakable terms his indifference to anything anyone else might say or think and his unshakable certainty that, since he was manifestly right, it would be a waste of time to interact with any of the hoi polloi in the muddy trenches of language evolution.
¹⁰

 

Does the fact that Chomsky is now contributing to the discussion on language evolution mean that he is conceding it is crucial to linguistics? Pinker said no. “He gives with one hand and takes with the other. Chomsky says, ‘All hypotheses are worthless, so here’s mine, which is as worthless as anyone else’s.’” This latest gyration in a long career of twists and turns, Pinker said, marks the beginning of Chomsky’s decadent phase.

What does it mean that one man had such a long-standing and wide-reaching impact? “I don’t think it is good,” said Pinker.

 

Because Chomsky has such an outsize influence in the field of linguistics, when he has an intuition as to what a theory ought to look like, an army of people go out and reanalyze everything to conform to that intuition. To have a whole field turn on its heels every time one person wakes up with a revelation can’t be healthy. It leads to a lack of cumulativeness, and an unhealthy fractiousness. It’s an Orwellian situation where today Oceania is the ally and Eurasia is the enemy, and tomorrow it’s the other way around. Time and effort and emotional effort get wasted.

 

Ray Jackendoff likened Chomsky’s persona and influence to that of Freud in psychoanalysis. “Freud especially is an interesting model,” Jackendoff said. “Even though the specifics of the way Freud thought about things have been shown to be incorrect, nowadays we still take for granted all the basic ideas of Freud’s approach to the mind, about people’s motives and what drives them. Everyone who goes to a therapist now owes it to Freud. The same is true of Chomsky. The idea that you can look at language as a computational system invested in the mind and that there’s an acquisition problem that requires some question about what the child is bringing to the learning process, and that there are formal tools for discovering language in great detail—that’s now taken totally for granted in the field and that came from him.”

The study of language evolution is in some ways the opposite of the formal linguistics that Chomsky created. It doesn’t start with language as a formal abstraction, but grounds it first in the human body, and in history. The questions that Chomsky considers critical, such as “Is language useless but perfect or useful and imperfect?” are not much discussed outside considerations of his own work. As for the notion that linguistics poses a crisis for biology, most evolutionary biologists and other researchers in the field seem confident that they can be brought into consilience.
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The power that Chomsky has wielded and still does is impressive. Many researchers regard the ideas in the
Science
language evolution paper as just the natural maturation and progression of a brilliant mind. This one man and his unique ideas have influenced literally thousands of academics. In the early days of language evolution, his name was used as an obsessive touchstone in many articles. But people now seem to be freeing themselves from that influence.

Few are up to the task of disentangling the ideas
attributed
to Chomsky from the ideas that
really are
his. Without a doubt, people hold him responsible for things he didn’t say. And he is often accused of denying things he did say.

As for generative linguistics, in the gentle phrasing of Jim Hurford, it is taking the burden off universal grammar. Indeed, all the evidence about genes, gesture, speech, physiology, and brain damage point away from UG. Today, many researchers who argue that the innateness of language is neither language-specific nor grammatical in nature still use the term “UG.” Some researchers even go to the trouble of pointing out that what they mean by “UG” is neither universal nor a grammar, a caveat that surely qualifies the term as either misleading or irrelevant.

Only time will tell if the magnitude of Chomsky’s influence will persist. Currently the divide between his many critics and supporters remains religious in its zeal, with many researchers believing that Chomsky is an academic villain who led linguistics completely astray. In some lights, however, their problem is a definitional one. Chomsky’s interest extends only to what he considers the syntactic core of language. This necessarily excludes all this other study. Why should this matter so much? Having interests, and therefore areas of indifference, is a freedom allowed most everyone else in academia, but Chomsky’s lack of interest in a topic often leads to umbrage. Others still see him as the source of everything we now know. Charles Yang, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and author of
The Infinite Gift,
wrote in the
London Review of Books
that Pinker and most other researchers are merely turning over the rocks at the base of the Chomskyan landslide.
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As for language evolution, these facts are undeniable: Chomsky dismissed it for a long time, his dismissal was treated as an irrefutable argument, and now language evolution has taken on a life of its own. Probably the truth is that the boom in language evolution has occurred both because of and in spite of him. Chomsky brought the attention of the world to the complexity of language and its innateness. Whether his version of complexity and innateness will endure is another matter.

The overriding outcome of the language evolution debate kicked off by Chomsky’s 2002 paper was that it became abundantly clear to everyone in the field that, as Jackendoff put it, one’s theory of language evolution depended on one’s theory of language. And even though Chomsky’s contributions set the agenda for linguistics and cognitive science for the latter part of the twentieth century, many researchers rejected the way that that paper attempted to rein in all the evidence and set the crucial questions for language evolution in the coming century. There’s no doubt that Hauser’s and Fitch’s experimental work will be central to the ongoing language evolution dialogue, but the specifics of the Chomskyan framework may not last as long.

In some ways, it bodes well for the study of language evolution that it can’t yet be compressed into a neat framework. It has always been a quirky field, and it retains much of its oddness. For example, the energetic back-and-forth between Pinker, Jackendoff, Chomsky, Hauser, and Fitch belies the fact that all five subscribe to a basic model in which language is somehow generated from the human brain.

Lieberman, on the other hand, is antigenerativist, and yet both he and Pinker agree on a first and fundamental principle—that you have to start with evolution in order to really get at the true nature of language. Jackendoff, who has been a Chomskyan linguist from the very start of the Chomskyan era, now proposes that formal grammars should be constructed so that they are consistent with an exploration of language evolution.

Within language evolution, computational modeling has been an enormous hit. In fact, Simon Kirby’s success with modeling has led him back to an interesting place. Now he’s trying to run generations of language learning through the minds of real people. He recently conducted a pilot study where he put individuals in a room and presented them with a small-world, talking-heads-style experiment. The subjects looked at a screen that contained a number of objects that were distinguished along a few dimensions, like color, shape, and movement. Across the bottom of the screen ran a series of invented words, an “alien” language that described what was pictured on the screen. The subjects were asked to try to learn the alien language. They were then tested on a series of pictures, which included some they hadn’t seen before (hardly any of the participants noticed this fact). Inevitably the subjects did not feed back only the language elements that they had been given. There were mistakes, modifications, and elaborations.

The study was intergenerational, because Kirby ran the subjects one after the other, and each time the alien language was, in fact, the answers the previous subject gave to the test pictures. Except for the initial random language given to the first subject, there was no alien language, only the contributions of each individual, which were culturally transmitted from generation to generation. Each subject in the experiment believed that he was simply giving back what he had learned, but instead the language was evolving. “It’s the same as the modeling,” Kirby explained, “in that it gets easier to speak the language with each generation.” He had originally thought that speakers might generate different elements to mark each of the features and then combine them in a precise kind of way. But that’s not how they did it. “People take whatever elements of structure they are given,” said Kirby, “and they go with it.”

Kirby’s first foray into modeling language evolution with human agents bears out what his digital models have predicted. “Structure organically emerges in the alien language, and it does it in a cumulative way. No single individual has created structured language, but it emerges after several generations from the accretion of lots of individuals’ contributions.” Darwin alluded to the emergent properties of language when he wrote in
The Descent of Man
that language is a cultural invention, though
not
a conscious one. As he and others have put it, the appearance of design does not necessitate the work of a designer. Kirby said, “It is real cultural evolution, steered by the biology of our experimental participants, but with an evolutionary dynamic and adaptive logic of its own. Features of the evolving languages in our experiments are there for their own selfish reasons (they are better at surviving to the next generation), not because of our desire to invent them.”

Luc Steels’s work heads in ever more creative directions. Steels, Vittorio Loreto (a physicist at the Università di Roma), and other colleagues are investigating ways to integrate what is known about the dynamics of semiotic systems with technology. The researchers are intrigued by the way that Web sites such as del.icio.us and flickr.com enable users to tag online resources, sharing commentary and other data with users. “Tagging sites glue online social communities by pushing thousands of people to take part in a collective effort to attach metadata,” said Loreto. With these sites, the popularity of a tag will typically begin to spread slowly; however, there is a phenomenon where one tag may suddenly become significantly more popular than all the rest. Steels and Loreto’s new experiments with autonomous agents engaged in language games (such as Steels’s “talking heads”) are showing that in the same way that widespread agreement about a tag may suddenly emerge in a social networking site, there can also be dramatic transitions in a network of digital agents, where a shared set of conventions suddenly replaces a phase of chaotic disagreement. The dynamics of meaning can help explain a similar phenomenon in human communication—how large populations of speakers suddenly converge on the use of a new word or grammatical construct.