On Innate Grammar
Charles Darwin was a smart scientist, in my opinion -- whatever you may think of the current status of his theories. He observed and made a valid hypothesis that made a lot of sense (which doesn't necessarily mean something is true). He did not just theorize about biological evolution. He also pondered the evolution of languages.
Linguistics is a true science. It makes observations, collects data, proposes hypotheses and theories, and seeks to disprove them.
Still, though language evolutionary theory and biological evolutionary share many of the same ideas and even though Darwin proposed a link, not until recently have people considered that "natural selection" could affect languages as well as "cultural selection", that is, it has always been assumed that languages simply evolved due to people using them, not by any biological changes.
But I'm actually not interested in a Darwinian view of language. I think Darwinism has been used to explain all sorts of things (such as social psychology), and it tends to fail miserably in those areas in my opinion. But the idea that there could be a biological aspect to language I find very intriguing.
A linguist/scientist named Noam Chomsky studied language development in children all over the world and found that nearly all children develop the same fundamental rules of grammar. Interestingly enough, children develop these grammar rules from a far narrower list of example sentences from their parents and family than the possible list of sentence types. No one starts talking to his or her child by holding 3 cups of different colors and says one after the other "blue cup," "red cup," "yellow cup" until they figure out the concept of adjectives and colors. No, we say, "Who's a cute, little baby girl? Yes, Kathryn is! Daddy loves Kathryn," or other such foolishness.
So if there is an innate grammar, that leaves some interesting questions. Is it biological? Is grammar somehow built into the genetics of what eventually become our brain cells? Or is there some metaphysical part to us that contains this innate grammar?
Linguistics is a true science. It makes observations, collects data, proposes hypotheses and theories, and seeks to disprove them.
Still, though language evolutionary theory and biological evolutionary share many of the same ideas and even though Darwin proposed a link, not until recently have people considered that "natural selection" could affect languages as well as "cultural selection", that is, it has always been assumed that languages simply evolved due to people using them, not by any biological changes.
But I'm actually not interested in a Darwinian view of language. I think Darwinism has been used to explain all sorts of things (such as social psychology), and it tends to fail miserably in those areas in my opinion. But the idea that there could be a biological aspect to language I find very intriguing.
A linguist/scientist named Noam Chomsky studied language development in children all over the world and found that nearly all children develop the same fundamental rules of grammar. Interestingly enough, children develop these grammar rules from a far narrower list of example sentences from their parents and family than the possible list of sentence types. No one starts talking to his or her child by holding 3 cups of different colors and says one after the other "blue cup," "red cup," "yellow cup" until they figure out the concept of adjectives and colors. No, we say, "Who's a cute, little baby girl? Yes, Kathryn is! Daddy loves Kathryn," or other such foolishness.
So if there is an innate grammar, that leaves some interesting questions. Is it biological? Is grammar somehow built into the genetics of what eventually become our brain cells? Or is there some metaphysical part to us that contains this innate grammar?