
Chomsky was wrong: evolutionary analysis shows languages obey few rules - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/04/chomsky-was-wrong-evolutionary-analysis-shows-languages-obey-few-rules.ars
======
_delirium
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but a genealogical analysis of language
seems like a strange way to attack Chomsky's overall hypothesis. The
fundamental point of the poverty-of-stimulus argument is that there must be
strong inductive biases in whatever language-learning apparatus we possess,
since we seem to quickly converge on something deemed grammatical in our
language, with relatively few examples.

Showing that a particular property varies pretty randomly across languages,
correlated only with lineage, is decent evidence that that property isn't
universal. That would attack some stronger possible formulations of universal
grammar (which maybe Chomsky has actually advanced; I don't recall) that claim
not only that we have an inductive bias in language learning, but that: here
is a list of specific language features that are universal.

But it doesn't show that there _isn't_ some inductive bias, or even a
generative-grammar-style inductive bias, where "human language, in all its
possible variations" is a parameterized space significantly smaller than the
space of all possible symbol protocols, and relatively easy for us to learn
because we're hardwired with the parameterization (but not the specific
parameter settings).

Admittedly I am familiar with machine learning and not very familiar with
current work in linguistics, so I could be totally missing some reason that
makes my field's methods inapplicable to theirs, inconceivable as that might
be. ;-)

~~~
SiVal
Chomsky's idea wasn't that there was a strong inductive bias in language
learning, it was that language isn't learned at all; it grows in the brain, as
his accolyte Pinker claims, "like teeth grow in the mouth." You don't "learn"
to have teeth, do you?, Pinker asks.

How can this be, when we see so obviously that kids raised by Greek speakers
learn Greek while those raised by English speakers learn English?

It's because, acc. to Chomsky and his followers ("Modern Linguists"), Greek
and English are really the same language, and kids don't LEARN this language,
called "Universal Grammar," they GROW it. What they DO learn is the values of
some "parameters" that cause different instantiations of UG to appear
superficially different, like Greek and English.

This quickly required the definition of "language" to exclude every aspect of
language except syntax, because everything else so obviously was learned and
wasn't universal, and even with syntax, they ended up having to exclude the
syntax actually used by real speakers really speaking. That syntax become
known as "performance" as distinct from "competence", which was the universal
language people really knew deep down inside but which got corrupted in real
use by various noise-inducing factors.

So "real language" became syntax only, and then, only carefully constructed
written examples of proper, uncorrupted "competence" syntax. And with those,
all native speakers could use their innate rules plus parameter settings to
unanimously agree on which word sequences were valid and which were invalid.
You had a rule-based syntax with universal rules, right?

Except that, with each passing year, researchers outside the linguistics
departments found more and more examples where native speakers disagreed over
validity, and validity decisions that weren't discrete (clearly valid or
clearly invalid) but were often shades of gray. (Inside linguistics
departments, conformity to Chomskyism orthodoxy was usually enforced, as
academia tends to do, so "linguistics research" has supported Chomsky for
decades, while cognitive science hasn't.)

There were so many differences among native speakers of a single language, not
to mention the ever-growing catalog of diversity between languages and the way
that languages gradually diverge instead of in clearly discrete jumps, and so
many shades of gray in judgments among natives that the notion of parameters
got more and more ridiculous, even with the notion of "language" pared down to
almost nothing.

Sure, you could claim that all books are the same universal book, too, as long
as each character is a parameter. If so, then all languages are the same
language under the surface, too, plus or minus some parameter settings.

Chomsky's ridiculous language ideas would have been thrown out long ago if he
hadn't been such a leftist "intellectual icon" in the leftist temples of
academia and media. Instead, his theory just changed dramatically from version
to version but remained unquestionably true throughout. Every few years he
would significantly revamp his "program." In 2002 he seemed to abandon
everything about syntax, too, except for recursion. What's unique about human
language, as opposed to the general principles found in all human (and some
animal) cognition, is just the innate, universal ability to handle recursion
in syntax. (That paper apparently infuriated Pinker by cutting his "Language
Instinct" position down to just a syntactical recursion instinct.)

What a bunch of nonsense. And this paper is just one more nail in the coffin
of "modern linguistics".

~~~
jfm3
This is factually wrong in a number of ways. Modern linguists don't throw out
"every aspect of language but syntax" (as you yourself indicate later in your
own post). There are falsifiability problems ("all books are the same
universal book too, so long as each character is a parameter") with some
theories, but you have to start with a theory at some point.

I can relate to your sentiment that he's favored because he's such a lefty,
but it's not really an argument.

He revamps his "program" every few years because he recognizes it as wrong.
I'm not sure why you cite that as a bad thing?

~~~
SiVal
"He revamps his "program" every few years because he recognizes it as wrong.
I'm not sure why you cite that as a bad thing?"

The "bad thing" is not the person who decides that he was wrong; the bad thing
is the theory that was wrong and the "modern linguists" who still promote it.
The notion of "universal grammar" came from the original version(s) of the
theory: Everyone knows a fantastically complex rule system perfectly by some
very young age, which can't possibly be learned from noisy, real-world
experience in so short a time, so language must be innate, like teeth, and
since humans are all the same species, the language must be a universal
language, which must have some parameters to explain the illusion that they
aren't the same.

By 2002, there were not enough legs of that original theory still standing
(still believed by even Chomsky himself) to support the notion of a "universal
grammar."

Yet despite the fact that nobody starting fresh with what we know today would
ever propose a theory of innate, universal grammar, we still have most people
calling themselves "modern linguists" claiming to believe it.

Universal grammar is nonsense, and modern linguists' failure to drop it is the
"bad thing."

"...you have to start with a theory at some point."

Yes, and you have to drop it at some point when new evidence keeps making it
less and less plausible. That point was years ago.

~~~
hasenj
The alternative to Universal Grammar is Skinner style behaviorism; which is
clearly wrong.

Think of Universal Grammar is a rule for building grammar rules.

It's pretty clear that humans have a distinct innate ability to learn
language: no monkey can learn English no matter how much you try to teach it.
You can teach animals all kinds of interesting behavior but you can't teach
them language.

> Yet despite the fact that nobody starting fresh with what we know today
> would ever propose a theory of innate, universal grammar, we still have most
> people calling themselves "modern linguists" claiming to believe it.

Quite the contrary. Anyone starting fresh would probably start with an
assumption about some innate ability to learn language.

~~~
SiVal
The alternative to UG is not behaviorism; there are countless alternatives.
There are all sorts of learning algorithms that are more plausible than UG or
behaviorism.

Yes, it IS clear that humans have an innate ability to LEARN languages, as you
insist. Unfortunately, UG denies this, claiming that we CAN'T possibly learn
anything as rich and complex as a human language in so short a time with so
little, and such messy, input, and since humans have NO innate ability to
LEARN human (first) languages, they must instead GROW them "like you grow
teeth."

"The alternative to UG" isn't behaviorism, it's that languages are LEARNED.

>"Quite the contrary. Anyone starting fresh would probably start with an
assumption about some innate ability to learn language."

You're so right, except that your claim is not contrary to me, it's contrary
to UG. Now try to convince the modern linguists of your theory that humans
have the innate ability to LEARN first languages and see how that goes.

~~~
Afton
You are substantially mis-characterizing modern linguistic theory/linguists.
The 'grow them like you grow teeth' is meant to indicate that, given certain
inputs/environment, a child will develop normal language function. You don't
need to 'learn' it in the sense that you _do_ need to learn e.g. how to read.
The reason for the contrast (argues a linguist) is that we have some internal
cognitive structures that react to certain kinds of input, namely linguistic
input, and that that reaction is called 'learning your first language(s)'.
They disagree with the 'common sense' approach, that learning your first
language is just like learning anything else.

I would characterize the debate between linguists and a certain class of
cognitive scientists like this:

CogSci: Hey, you keep talking about UG/Innate mechanisms! We don't like
that/it seems implausible. Instead, we should just have general learning
algorithms that can be utilized to learn language!

Ling: Cool! Show us! Show us!

CogSci: Well...Here's a machine learning model that can learn English past
tense with the following training data.

Ling: Oh. Um. Hmmm. Yeah, the data is more complex than that. How far can you
get with _this_ data (unloads data by the truckful). Also: that looks like how
adults learn things (the kinds of errors made), not really how kids learn
language (they make different kinds of errors). Can you model that?

CogSci: It's a simple model! It can't handle that data. That's for a later
paper! Also, we don't care about the error classifications, as long as it
looks like learning.

Ling: Ok. Let us know when that paper comes out. Have you seen this Bantu
data? It's pretty cool too.

CogSci: _later_ : Ok, look. We didn't get the model to work, but we really
think your multiplying entities. I mean, it's just crazy/biologically-
implausible/ugly to postulate this innate knowledge.

Ling: Yup. But here's the deal. We can't manage to actually explain everything
we want even if we postulate innate rules/knowledge like _crazy_. Maybe we
have a fundamentally broken model. Maybe machine learning really will come and
eat our babies (or maybe the kinds of things we're postulating will turn out
to built on top of machine learning, as explanations at different levels). But
so far, it's the best we've got.

Obviously, people write books on these arguments, so some massive
simplification was done here. And there is some really cool work being done by
general cognitive scientists in the language space.

------
compay
I studied linguistics in the 90's, including a class and a few seminars with
Chomsky, but left grad school after a year. At this point I'm neither a
linguist nor an expert but maintain a slightly more than passive interest in
the field.

These kinds of crackpot articles surface every couple of years in the
mainstream press, always from people who demonstrate no knowledge of Chomsky's
work beyond having read the back cover of his 1965 "Aspects of the Theory of
Syntax."

I didn't read the original article, but as described in the Ars article, the
thesis makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The fact that we may have a hard
time reconciling how languages can be diverse in their handling of
subject/object/verb order doesn't disprove the concept of Universal Grammar.
In fact, it's an argument _for_ Universal Grammar that we can even have a
coherent conversation about the way _all_ languages handle subject/object/verb
order - Universal Grammar is not about providing a set of rules describe all
languages, it's about explaining what a possible rule is, and you have to
approach that with logic rather than statistics.

The Ars article talks about "languages that have been evolving for a minimum
of 4,000 years," as if those languages simply sprung into existence a little
more than 4 millennia ago with no relation to anything else. This is the
linguistic equivalent of creationism.

[Edit: expanded acronym "UG" to "Universal Grammar" for clarity]

~~~
jxcole
Sorry, but even though my passing knowledge of linguists may be far
outstripped by yours, I still think you may be mistaken.

The statements made by the article are related to something called Universal
Grammar, it is not related to syntax theory or Chomsky hierarchies:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar>

According to the article, Chomsky probably didn't invent universal grammar,
but he was certainly a strong proponent.

As to the second point, the article claims that languages have been evolving
for a minimum of 4,000 years, not a maximum of four thousand years. This is a
perfectly accurate statement about all known species of animals. All it really
says is that we have records that lead us to know for certain that certain
sets of languages had common roots as soon as 4,000 years ago, but we are not
sure about their common roots before that.

This sort of argument is very common in genetics; I recall reading a book
about how human men can all be traced to a common ancestor 90,000 years back.
This does not imply that scientists believe humans sprang into being 90,000
years ago.

~~~
compay
Well, I was admitted to a PhD program in linguistics which required more than
passing familiarity with the basic concepts of Chomsky's research, of which
Universal Grammar is _the_ basic concept.

In my comment UG = Universal Grammar.

------
impendia
A friend of mine, who is a graduate student in linguistics, told me the
following story. (Caveat: this is urban legend-ish; the details could have
been exaggerated.)

Once Chomsky was giving a lecture on different features of languages. For some
feature (call it X; I forget the technical details), he boldly asserted that
no human language could conceivably do X and proceeded to go on and on about
why X was absolutely impossible.

There was a hand from the audience. "Estonian does X."

~~~
leoc
It would be hard to put anything beyond a language that has 14 cases:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_grammar>

------
williamdix
So here is the issue that the actual article discusses. In generating
sentences, you have grammars with rewrite rules like

    
    
      PP(Prepositional Phrase) := P(Preposition)NP(Noun Phrase).
    

In such a rule, the preposition is the head. There is an assertion that
languages have the property head-first or complement-first. In this case, the
complement-first rule would instead be

    
    
      PP := NP(Noun Phrase) P(Preposition)
    

So in head-first languages, we would see:

    
    
      PP := P NP
      The man is PP(in the house)
      VP := V NP
      I VP(ate the bird)
    

And in complement-first languages, we would see:

    
    
      PP := NP P
      The man is PP(the house in)
      VP := NP V
      I VP(the bird ate)
    

The article states that if head-first and complement-first were robust,
universal features of languages, then we would expect the evolutionary model
to show that the appearances of word orders demonstrating these features are
dependent on each other across language families. However, it does not show
this across the language families. It only shows that certain word orders
created by head-firstness or complement-firstness are dependent in certain
language families.

I hope this was a decent enough explanation and easy for others to follow. I
was a Linguistics major, so it can be hard for me to explain it well and in an
easy to understand way.

[edited in an attempt at formatting] [edited to provide more examples]

~~~
T-R
I'm admittedly having a bit of trouble parsing the first sentence of your last
paragraph.

When you say "if head-first and complement-first were robust, universal
features of languages", do you mean "head-first and complement-first cover the
whole set of possibilities for the property 'word order'", or "all languages
(within a family?) are one or the other", or something more like "a given
language cannot contain both head-first and complement-first structures", or
something different?

Also, with "appearances of word orders demonstrating these features are
dependent on each other across language families", in what sense do you mean
that the appearances would be dependent on each other?

~~~
williamdix
I mean something along the lines of if head-first and complement-first are the
only possibilites for phrase rules and that they must apply to all phrase
rules for a given language, i.e.

    
    
      for all X, s.t. X is a grammatic category which can be the head of a phrase ; XP := X _
    

or

    
    
      for all X ; s.t. X is a grammatic category which can be the head of a phrase; XP := _ X 
    

Then, modulo processes which change a sentence from its underlying form to its
surface form, we would only see forms characteristic of head-first or
complement-first phrase structure.

In the second case, I intend dependent as the article means dependent. That is
co-appearing because of the same underlying feature. To use the genetic
analogy, co-appearing because one gene (the head firstness gene) determines
them.

~~~
T-R
Thanks kindly, much appreciated.

------
klochner
It's impossible to have an intelligent discussion without the original paper.

Chomsky didn't claim that all grammars obey the same word order, so it
_sounds_ like they're making bigger claims than they should be, assuming
they're just showing that word-order is mostly lineage-dependent.

~~~
ihodes
The original paper is always at the bottom of Ars articles. That's one reason
I subscribe.

Anyway, there seems to be a growing body of evidence contrary to Chomsky's
universal grammar–see Dan Everett for some more, e.g. It's interesting to see
some more about it.

([http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature09923.html))

EDIT: As pointed out below, you probably can't view this unless you're at a
university/college with access to Nature. Sorry about that. Open Access is
something you should support if this pisses you off.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I will say: Putting the link at the bottom of the article automatically makes
this better than 90% of the "science journalism" I ever see.

Now for problem number two: I don't have thirty-two dollars (!) to spend
reading this _one_ paper. Neither do most other people who aren't already in
the field.

For so long as the primary literature is behind these enormous paywalls,
science will continue to consist of a tiny tiny percentage of humanity talking
to themselves.

~~~
williamdix
Oh yeah! Working at a university pays off again. I'm glad you raised that
point, I was about to start commenting about the text of the article and now I
realize that everyone may not have access.

------
thisrod
Here's my understanding of Chomsky's argument.

Facts: I can write sentences that no one has ever spoken before. The rest of
you will have opinions whether they are allowed in English. Those opinions
will tend to agree.

Conclusion: Our knowledge of English is not purely derived from the sentences
we've heard. We must have had some model of a language in common when we
started, and we fit the parameters to what we heard as children.

I find that more convincing than anything in the linked article.

~~~
forensic
>The rest of you will have opinions whether they are allowed in English. Those
opinions will tend to agree.

These agreeing opinions could easily be due to a common cultural heritage and
a history of reinforcement. People get reinforced for speaking in a way that
is understood (and seen as correct) by others and so they speak that way. It
benefits them to conform. Since everyone who speaks English shares a cultural
language heritage, there is obviously a shared history of reinforcement. The
shared history of reinforcement leads to widespread agreement about rules, and
yet there are still plenty of examples of English dialects that violate rules
of other dialects.

For instance, Ebonics vs. American English. Both are valid dialects with
different rules. Both are English. Are you claiming that Ebonics speakers have
a different generative mechanism than American English speakers? Obviously
Ebonics has evolved __from__ American English, into something new.

Creative, meaningful responding exists outside of language and the evidence is
overwhelming that this creativity is due to reinforcement history rather than
some innate quality of the brain.

Anyway I don't think your facts lead to your conclusion at all.

~~~
thisrod
Obviously, feedback is part of learning language. B. F. Skinner argued that it
was the whole explanation, as you're claiming. That was the idea Chomsky
challenged.

You're not addressing the crucial point. The suprise isn't that people can
invent new sentences. It's how well they can tell if other speakers will
regard those sentences as valid English (or valid Ebonics). People can
evaluate sentences, and forms of sentences, that have never been spoken. They
could not have learned that by feedback, and linguists stuggle to state the
precise rules by which they do it.

~~~
forensic
>They could not have learned that by feedback

Why not? I'm not saying that grammar doesn't exist, I'm asking why it needs to
be innate?

The existence of grammar rules is what allows us to determine if a sentence is
grammatically correct. These rules could be learned through experience. Why do
they need to be innate?

I believe you don't understand Chomsky's argument. I'm not a die hard
behaviourist I just know the behaviourist position well enough to know that
your particular formulation of the "language is special" theory is easily
refuted.

------
lwhi
The main argument I took from Chomsky is that the human brain is predisposed
to language. I don't think proving whether language may have (/ may have not)
evolved from a single root is so interesting.

The interesting part for me, is that the brain is an organ that has evolved in
part due to its capability to process language, which in turn has been able to
affect our capacity and capability to think.

I believe humans do have an innate capacity for language - and this capacity
has provided us with an evolutionary advantage.

Whether or not all languages are similar or different isn't the point - the
fact that the brain is able to efficiently process (and evolve) language can
be seen as an example of evolutionary biology whether or not the precise
mechanisms are understood.

~~~
travisp
It's more than that there is just a predisposition for language. Chomsky
argues that this predisposition is a result of a universal grammar, or set of
grammar rules for organizing language that is a fundamental part of our
brains:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar>

So, for this theory, it does matter what differences and similarities there
are in grammar for different languages, and how those similarities or
differences came about. What this study does is show that at least for one
aspect of language, word order, what might seem to be universal fundamental
rules of grammar are not, and are shaped by cultural, not genetic, evolution.

~~~
lwhi
But I don't think a suggestion that there's such a thing as 'universal
grammar' is the same as a suggestion that syntactic grammar is going to be
shared between all languages.

As I understand it, the unifying element of UG could be simplistic or complex
- which might make the concept hard to discredit.

I'm pretty certain that syntactic grammar _would be_ the result of cultural
and genetic evolution. If both factors are available to influence a language's
evolution, I'd imagine that both would be likely to influence the way that
language evolves to some degree.

I think the most interesting part of this mystery is _how_ the brain's
capacity for language might be innate - and in this respect, looking at the
resultant artefacts produced by this processing might be a bit like looking at
the remnants scattered around the room after a party the night before.

Perhaps the concept of a shared UG is more relevant to the process than the
resulting syntactic structure?

------
jonknee
The author of the paper is on Reddit and is taking questions.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gpb84/chomsky_was_w...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gpb84/chomsky_was_wrong_evolutionary_analysis_shows/c1pa7xp)

------
Florin_Andrei
> given that there aren't obvious word order patterns across languages, how
> does the human brain do so well at learning the rules that are a peculiarity
> to any one of them?

That simply means there are rules at a deeper level in the brain, and they may
crystallize this way, or that way, depending on the particular language.

The study, if correct, simply says the rules are not apparent at the outermost
level. Well, dig deeper, go closer to the hardware, and at some level the
universal order should appear again.

After all, my neurons don't work any different than your neurons. But I
suspect the highest level where universal rules operate is higher than that.

~~~
entangld
There are similar analogies to bird songs.

In bird studies, one bird species can be raised completely around a foreign
bird species until they learn the foreign songs, yet the native fledgling will
sing the new notes in their own species specific patterns (as if there is a
neural template).

I'm not a linguistic professional, but I imagine humans have some hardwired
language patterns and others that are historical artifacts.

~~~
nopassrecover
Or it could just be because they are _different species_ \- that means
different vocal chords, different brains, different ears and so on. It's
equivalent to saying "chimpanzees act like baby humans when taught to play
with blocks, yet still retain distinctive means of movement".

~~~
entangld
That study was about the presence of a neural template (and perhaps a
linguistic one). Before the study people thought it might be possible for any
singing bird to sing any other bird's songs.

An abstracted view of the point of the study is perhaps there is some
hardwiring in our communication. Kernels of hardwiring that can't be nurtured
away. In humans it would be analogous to the universal laws of linguistics.

It was just something to think about. Next time I'll just link the study.

------
Cacti
And all this time, I thought the language hierarchy, and it's correspondence
with math/logic categories, was the real theory. UG is kind of an irrelevant
side point, sort of an argument between "strong" vs "weak".

Type 0 - Recursivey enumerable. Type 1 - Context-sensitive. Type 2 - Context-
free. Type 3 - Regular.

As all languages fall into one of those 4 categories, and no other (so far),
that seems to me to be THE definition of "following the rules" to an extreme.

Once you've identified which category a language is in, the word order and
semantics are pretty damned irrelevant, as any experience computer programmer
can attest (Java vs C++, Python vs Ruby, etc).

------
SlipperySlope
I'm writing a robust parser for English using the principles of construction
grammar. In contrast with Chomsky, CG has as its chief characteristic a
pairing between form and semantics. We learn that "bird" means the concept of
bird. We learn idioms the same way: "he's a cool customer" means the concept
of a person calm in pressure situations.

One is indeed _lucky_ if born into a culture with patterns between these
pairings.

In my opinion there is no universal grammar and if my parser eventually works
for English, it will have completely different construction rules for each
targeted natural language beyond English.

------
awakeasleep
I wish I knew more about this subject.

For one thing, if we're looking for a biological basis of language, what makes
subject-verb order the right level to look on? Why not look at the fact that
language is arranged into subjects and verbs as the relevant layer?

------
VladRussian
>Human languages are far more complex than any animal communication system
we're aware of...

may be we need to spend some time out of the anthropocentric box. There is a
whole world outside of it.

------
Tycho
Language is a recursive process, and (according to GEB) a property of
recursive processes tends to be wild unpredictability the deeper you go.

Just thinking aloud.

------
grandalf
Chomsky proposes only two rules: Merge and Move.

------
nickpinkston
Sounds like languages aren't manufactured by consent ;-)

Sorry - I couldn't resist ;-)

~~~
samtp
The phrase "Manufacturing Consent" has nothing to do with universal grammar.
It is about the factors that create a news environment that favors specific
interests.

~~~
nickpinkston
Yes, I fully know that. I read Chomsky's politics far more than linguistics. I
was making a joke where the analogy was that:

A: Languages were the 5 factors of media control cover in MC. B: "Consent" was
a common set of language principles representing Chomsky's linguistics.

Too much of a reach?

------
brudgers
Generative grammar, verb-noun order disproves?

Against Bayesian analysis, "Wittgenstein's language games predisposed to play
we are," universal grammar better describes.

English still Yoda speak is.

