TLS review of James Hurford's The Origins of Grammar HERE. The anti-Chomskyan uptake is here:
Even the core Subject–Predicate organization of sentences “comes not from thought, but from communication”. While the social side of language matters deeply to Hurford, there are good reasons why he has given the matter of grammatical structure some 800 pages of his undivided attention. One of these reasons is that grammar, or more specifically syntax, has for more than half a century held centre-stage in the science of language and in attempts to define what makes language special. One influential view has it that the critical innovation in our species is a mental faculty just for syntax, a specialized device in the brain for putting words together in productive ways. The philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky has argued that this innovation had nothing at all to do with communication. Its initial utility was merely as a tool of private thought, and any usefulness that syntax was to have for communication would be merely a pleasing side effect. On this point, and quite a few others, Hurford disagrees, and in doing so he is part of what is at least a major pendulum swing, and by some accounts a real paradigm shift, in current cognitive science. It is a shift towards the view that what is really special about language is not its formal properties of combination and recursion, but its functionality in the social world. Language is our tool for doing things socially, or as Hurford likes to put it, “doing things to other people”. The puzzle is how language as a tool for action becomes language as an abstract semiotic system.
Man, it would be a blast to teach this book and Lance and Kukla's Yo and Lo in the same class. From the review it is clear that there are a lot of fascinating connections.
The other big anti-Chomskyan heresies of the book are the defenses of gradualism and the view that evolutionary explanations have purchase with respect to the development of language.
[For a presentation of other anti-Chomskyan perspectives, see the discussion on the post on the Piraha controversy HERE, and Geoffrey Pullum's summary HERE. Pullum just shows how the Chomskyans have done their normal thing of revising the view while claiming not to have changed it and then still inexplicably viciously attacking the person whose position wouldn't affect the revised view. With the help of friend-of-the-blog Reinhard Muskens, our discussion was able to get into more detail about the status of universal grammar versus non-transformational computation-and-semantics-friendly frameworks such as Categorial Grammar, Tree Adjoining Grammar, and Head Driven Phrase Stucture Grammar.]
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