Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of "universal," we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition. Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills.

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The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science

Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. David McNeill. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 416 pp.

Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought

Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as "one of degree and not of kind" (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (PSS) (Newell 1980). We show that this symbolic-relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain. We propose a representational-level specification as to where human and nonhuman animals' abilities to approximate a PSS are similar and where they differ. We conclude by suggesting that recent symbolic- connectionist models of cognition shed new light on the mechanisms that underlie the gap between human and nonhuman minds.

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Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds

International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (vol. 10)

It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a "moving target" both over time and across different human populations, and, hence, cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG - the mesh between learners and languages - arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent "organism," which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms. That is, languages themselves are shaped by severe selectional pressure from each generation of language users and learners. This suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics.

/pdf/language-as-shaped-by-the-brain-24xipzkzns.pdf

Language as shaped by the brain

This report contains a linguistic description of a language created spontaneously without any apparent external influence in a stable existing community. We describe the syntactic structure of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, a language that has arisen in the last 70 years in an isolated endogamous community with a high incidence of nonsyndromic, genetically recessive, profound prelingual neurosensory deafness. In the space of one generation from its inception, systematic grammatical structure has emerged in the language. Going beyond a conventionalized list of words for actions, objects, people, characteristics, and so on, a systematic way of marking the grammatical relations among those elements has appeared in the form of highly regular word order. These systematic structures cannot be attributed to influence from other languages, because the particular word orders that appear in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language differ from those found both in the ambient spoken languages in the community and in the other sign language found predominantly in the surrounding area. Therefore, the emerging grammatical structures should be regarded as an independent development within the language.

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The emergence of grammar: Systematic structure in a new language

Sign languages have two strikingly different kinds of morphological structure: sequential and
simultaneous The simultaneous morphology of two unrelated sign languages, American and
Israeli Sign Language, is very similar and is largely inflectional, while what little sequential
morphology we have found differs significantly and is derivational We show that at least two
pervasive types of inflectional morphology, verb agreement and classifier constructions, are iconically
grounded in spatiotemporal cognition, while the sequential patterns can be traced to normal
historical development We attribute the paucity of sequential morphology in sign languages to
their youth This research both brings sign languages much closer to spoken languages in their
morphological structure and shows how the medium of communication contributes to the structure
of languages

http://sandlersignlab.haifa.ac.il/html/html_eng/pdf/AMS%20Language.pdf

The Paradox of Sign Language Morphology

The division of linguistic structure into a meaningless (phonological) level and a meaningful level of morphemes and words is considered a basic design feature of human language. Although established sign languages, like spoken languages, have been shown to be characterized by this bifurcation, no information has been available about the way in which such structure arises. We report here on a newly emerging sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, which functions as a full language but in which a phonological level of structure has not yet emerged. Early indications of formal regularities provide clues to the way in which phonological structure may develop over time.

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The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language

/pdf/emerging-sign-languages-4ilbdoziiw.pdf

Emerging Sign Languages

Verb agreement in sign languages (illustrated here by Israeli Sign Language, ISL) seems to differ greatly from that of spoken languages, as it seems to be thematically oriented and is realized morphologically only on a subset of verbs in the language. These properties present both typological and theoretical challenges, since agreement is generally regarded as a structural relation, realized morphologically as inflectional affixes on the verbal element. These challenges are addressed here by applying aparticular componential analysis (along the lines of Jackendoff 1990) to the class of verbs which inflect for agreement in ISL. This analysis enables us to capture and explain the similarities as well as differences between the agreement systems of signed and spoken languages. It argues that agreement is basically a structural relation in languages in both modalities. The unique properties of sign language verb agreement are attributed to the difference in the agreeing element: verbs and auxiliaries in spoken languages vs. a spatial predicate in sign languages. These conclusions have some significant theoretical implications, both for capturingaspects of the interaction between modality and the structure of language, andfor imposing restrictions on the structure of the lexicon.

/pdf/a-cross-modality-perspective-on-verb-agreement-3qj7jq9rgh.pdf

Irit Meir

Papers

The emergence of grammar: Systematic structure in a new language

The Paradox of Sign Language Morphology

The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language

Emerging Sign Languages

A cross-modality perspective on verb agreement