Re: First language acquisition

noesy_parker wrote:

John Flynn wrote:

But in biology, anything that is not
available for natural selection to maintain is usually lost or
degraded. Consider the species that moves into subterranean
environments and loses its eyesight simply because having 100%
working vision is no advantage to having 50% working vision in
such an environment. When the inevitable mutations hit the part
of the genome that affect eyesight and degrade it, this will make
no difference to the underground species, so degradations to
eyesight are passed on and are not kept in check by selection,
leading eventually to a general loss of eyesight throughout the species
(assuming it stays in the dark environment). How this process does not
affect the language- encoding part of the human genome is never
explained. There have been Parameters proposed that are applicable
only to, say, polysynthetic languages. How are these maintained
intact in non-polysynthetic language-speaking populations, as
evidently they must be if we can swap a child from poly- to non-
polysynthetic language (or vice versa) with no degradation in their
language ability?

I'm really surprise at this criticsm. Just so that I don't misunderstand,
what do the critics think is the time period in which a genetic trait
can disappear within a population through evolution, and what is the
time period for an ancestral language to diverge into poly and non-
poly-synthetic languages?

Well, I tried to compress a whole raft of criticism into that one
paragraph, and I assumed a lot of stuff to try to keep it short, but
since you asked...

The criticism is mainly directed at the idea of Universal Grammar that
assumes an underlying Uniformitarianism (see Frederick Newmeyer's
chapter in _Language Evolution_, edited by Kirby and Christiansen, for
a short and readable debate on this issue and the almost universal
default assumption that it is true). That is, that all languages
now and all languages in the past (at least, after we entered the
period of fully modern language, chronologically after the proposed
"protolanguage" eras of Bickerton, Wray, Arbib, Mithen, et al.) and all
languages for the forseeable future are of equal complexity and operate
on the same principles (a truly "Universal Grammar", in other words).

If we take this default assumption (and it's one of the basic ideas in
most linguistic theories; otherwise we revert to the idea that some
languages are 'primitive' and others 'complex') then it comes with the
implication that anyone put into the right environment at the right age
can learn any language that exists now, in the past, or in the forseeable
future. To do this, according to the basic P&P proposal, we must have
an innate ability to cope with whatever aspect of the Universal Grammar
is thrown at us in the linguistic data in our environment. To address
your "time period" question indirectly, it's not the issue of how quickly
we can change genetically compared to linguistically, but that we *already
have the ability to switch within one generation* from one language type
to another. The evidence seems to point toward our being able to do this
quite easily. Child with parents from language type A can easily learn
language type A' as its native language.

So, according to basic P&P theory...

This means we have been carrying around in our genomes the 'hardwire'
code (in the form of DNA sequences) that will allow us to acquire any of
these languages perfectly. Or, at least, to a degree sufficient enough
to consider that acquisition to be native-like. For this to take place,
we would have to have *perfect* transmission of this genetic code from
parent to child to grandchild, and so on, with no errors, for every
part of this proposed genetic program. Even the slightest mutation or
unfortunate recombination would result in a part of our innate acquisition
ability being defective. You can see how this variation works in other
biological features. No child looks identical to its parents, for
example; or consider how one person can have a congential heart problem in
any otherwise healthy family; or just consider the variation in a
population's hair colouring or eye colouring or... a whole host of things
that we know are controlled by our genetic inheritance, and errors in
copying or detrimental recombinations can occur to produce, at worst,
defective traits and, at best, neutral variations. Do we see any of this
in the language ability in normal children? No. The default assumption
of the P&P approach is that you can take a child from anywhere and place
it halfway round the world and it will pick up that community's language
flawlessly. And by this I don't mean children with Specific Language
Impairment that may be caused by other developmental defects. I mean that
a perfectly healthy child who, if we assume that its language ability is
totally innate and under genetic control, should be just as likely to have
a mutation occur on its (hypothetical) "noun" gene complex as it is to be
an albino or to have green eyes from brown-eyed parents. But we don't see
any of these variations occurring. We never see anyone with the effects
of a point-mutation (a SNP -- a single nucleotide polymorphism) in the
hypothetical genes that control our innate language acquisition abilities.
With 6 billion or so people alive today, we should be seeing at least some
effects of the ubiquitous genetic mutation rate. Where are they? Where
are the people who lack, say, a fully functioning gene for the Head
Directionality Parameter but have an otherwise perfectly working language
acquisition ability? Or someone who has a SNP on their "subjacency"
gene sequence? Such people would be amazing to find and examine, but
we just don't find them. It appears that this is the only gene-driven
biological feature that can be transmitted through hundreds of generations
without even the tiniest degree of copying error.

Once again, this is only a small part of the biological problems of a
completely innate, gene-controlled language faculty, and I've already
written a whole chunk of text on it here. There are other points, too.
Philip Lieberman in _Uniquely Human_ has a few more objections to
Universal Grammar from a biological point of view (and his latest book
expands on a few more, but I've already plugged that one in another
thread a few weeks ago).

And how do they come to the assumption that poly and non-poly-synthetic
languages are due to different genetics traits?

That's not exactly what is proposed. I used the polysynthetic
language thing as an example. It needn't have been polysynthesis,
but that's a Parameter that is proposed to be fairly high up the
hierarchy of Parameters so it has a lot of dependencies.

If you think about that language-type, there will be features that
are heavily dependent on it and other features that apply only to non-
poly languages. If you have the Poly Parameter set to "yes" because
of the linguistic input of your environment, then it makes no difference
what settings you decide on for features that only crop up in non-poly
languages. In fact, you (or your language acquisition faculty) won't
ever have to decide on some features because you might never encounter
them. This means that the part of the innate genetic program that
allows us to decide on those features will never reach the surface;
they can drift about either being set to an arbitrary Parameter setting
or simply be ignored. Whatever happens to them, the important thing is
that are never exposed at the phenotypic level where selection keeps
them maintained. The genetic component that controls these unused
features can mutate and have copying errors hit it hundreds of times
and it won't matter to the surface product because the language being
learned does not need those features. Just like eyes in a subterranean
species. Natural selection is powerless to maintain an unexpressed
genetic sequence.

And yet... we are also suposed to believe under this approach that we
can take a child from any linguistic background (let's say, a child
whose lineage has spoken only English since it first became a distinct
language in the British Isles... making that, what?, about 1300 years
or so, which equals 50-60 generations, 50-60 occasions that required
perfect heredity and no harmful recombination) and put it into a
typologically-different linguistic environment, and that it will be
able to fire up those unchecked-by-natural-selection gene sequences
necessary for acquiring this new language? Something somewhere in that
is not right, and my money is on the proposed theory rather than the
ideas we have about how genetic inheritance works.

Take a look at Mark Baker's _The Atoms of Language_. He offers a
simplified P&P approach for the non-specialist from a true-believer's
point of view. To his credit, he does tackle a couple of biological
objections, but manages to brush them aside with a selectionist Just
So story. Not bad in itself, but he doesn't tackle the really
problematic issues. Still... it's a good read to know what the basic
P&P approach is about.

--
johnF
.

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