Ligia Parra-Esteban
Mon, 18 Feb 2002 08:04:47 -0800
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 13:31:37 -0000 Subject: [evol-psych] The Atoms of Language Human Nature Review 2002 Volume 2: 77-81 ( 13 February ) URL of this document http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/trask.html Book Review The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar. by Mark C. Baker. New York: Basic Books. 2001. xi + 276 pp. ISBN 0-465-00521-7. Reviewed by R. L. Trask, Professor of Linguistics, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QH, UK. Email:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Since the pioneering work of Joseph Greenberg in the 1960s, linguists haverealized that the grammars of languages do not normally consist of arbitrary collections of properties, but that instead they tend strongly to fall into more-or-less well-defined constellations of properties. In spite of a great deal of investigation, the reasons for these consistent - though far from exceptionless - co-occurrences of grammatical properties have remained largely obscure. In the early 1980s, the linguist Noam Chomsky proposed a speculative but spectacular explanation. As part of his more general view that human beings are genetically endowed with the principles of a "Universal Grammar" (UG), Chomsky suggested that the grammars of natural languages could differ significantly only in the "settings" for a (presumably small) number of possible "parameters". In other words, every child is born already "knowing" what the principles of grammar are and what the possible settings are for each parameter, and acquiring a first language consists only of guessing, from the linguistic input, what the appropriate setting is for each parameter in the language being acquired. (It is usually assumed that any given parameter has only two possible settings.) This proposal has attracted enormous attention, and in some quarters it has already achieved the standing of a piece of truth. Nevertheless, it has been fiercely criticized by linguists and others, on a variety of grounds. Full text http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/trask.html ______ New York Times January 15, 2002 'Hard-Wired' Grammar Rules Found for All Languages By BRENDA FOWLER In 1981 the linguist Noam Chomsky, who had already proposed that language was not learned but innate, made an even bolder claim. The grammars of all languages, he said, can be described by a set of universal rules or principles, and the differences among those grammars are due to a finite set of options that are also innate. If grammar were bread, then flour and liquid would be the universal rules; the options - parameters, Dr. Chomsky called them - would be things like yeast, eggs, sugar and jalapeņos, any of which yield a substantially different product when added to the universals. The theory would explain why grammars vary only within a narrow range, despite the tremendous number and diversity of languages. While most linguists would now agree that language is innate, Dr. Chomsky's ideas about principles and parameters have remained bitterly controversial. Even his supporters could not claim to have tested his theory with the really tough cases, the languages considered most different from those the linguists typically know well. But in a new book, Dr. Mark C. Baker, a linguist at Rutgers University whose dissertation was supervised by Dr. Chomsky, says he has discerned the parameters for a remarkably diverse set of languages, especially American-Indian and African tongues. Full text http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/15/health/anatomy/15LANG.html ____ The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar by Mark C. Baker Hardcover - 250 pages 1st edition (October 2, 2001) Basic Books; ISBN: 0465005217 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.04 x 9.59 x 6.45 AMAZON - US http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465005217/darwinanddarwini/ AMAZON - UK http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465005217/humannaturecom/ Editorial Reviews >From Publishers Weekly Rutgers University linguist Baker delivers a milestone in the field of linguistics. In fact, the book goes far in establishing linguistics as a hard science. But before diving into linguistic jargon, Baker engagingly describes the success of the Navajo Code Talkers during WWII; their language proved the one cipher that eluded Japanese cryptographers. While most people would consider words the components of language a lexical rather than a grammatical issue Baker explores the "parametric theory" posited by, among others, Noam Chomsky, which cites grammatical structure or "parameters as the atoms of linguistic diversity. " Many linguists find these parameters "recipes" for how words are put together to form meaning a satisfactory explanation for both the similarities and the differences between languages of completely different origins. English and Edo (West African), for example, are grammatically closer than English and French. Baker and others do not believe that word-order formulae stem from either cultural factors or "the survival dynamics of evolutionary biology." He doesn't, however, deny the cultural implications of language: numerous parameters prevented Napoleonic French, for example, from dominating Europe. Certain issues have weak explanations, such as the reasons that various Latinate languages developed divergent parameters. The concluding, somewhat indirect discussion of "hints of what parameters are related to" feels like a push for page count. Though Baker's comparison between linguistics and chemistry i.e., between the detection of grammatical "recipes" and chemists' long struggle to establish the periodic table may seem extreme to some, his clarification of complicated linguistics theories is more accessible than most. Sadly, few Americans care about word order (even in English), so this significant book may only get attention from specialists and libraries. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Book Description A major scientific breakthrough into the common elements of all languages, which give us a deeper insight than ever before into how the mind works. Whether all human languages are fundamentally the same or different has been a subject of debate for ages. This problem has deep philosophical implications: If languages are all the same, it implies a fundamental commonality-and thus the mutual intelligibility-of human thought. We are now on the verge of answering this question. Using a twenty-year-old theory proposed by the world's greatest living linguist, Noam Chomsky, researchers have found that the similarities among languages are more profound than the differences. Languages whose grammars seem completely incompatible may in fact be structurally almost identical, except for a difference in one simple rule. The discovery of these rules and how they may vary promises to yield a linguistic equivalent of the Periodic Table of the Elements: a single framework by which we can understand the fundamental structure of all human language. This is a landmark breakthrough, both within linguistics, which will thereby become a full-fledged science for the first time, and in our understanding of the human mind. About the Author Mark C. Baker is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He lives in Camden, New Jersey. __________ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Ligia Parra-Esteban Directora Fundacion VOC de Investigacion de la Comunicacion Entre Cientificos. Apartado Aereo 86745 Bogota. Colombia. http://www.mox.uniandes.edu.co/voc Telefono (+) 571-6242075 Fax (+) 571-6139654 Zona Postal 1102 E-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Secretario Junta Directiva Luis H. Blanco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Laboratorio de Investigaciones Basicas. Bloque 9 Ciudad Universitaria. 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