A biological object, a window into the mind, and a bridge across disciplines
This paper provides a general summary of some of the current issues in the field of Generative Grammar, the study of the human Faculty of Language. We review some key ideas this approach to language has put forward and pursued, focusing on the basic properties of language and its interactions with other systems. We also point at some of the possibilities that a biological approach to language offers to build bridges between Linguistics and other scientific disciplines. Throughout the paper we take into consideration the advantages that incorporating some of these ideas would have in Secondary Education not only for the potentially intrinsic value of linguistic knowledge, but also for the impact of this approach on more general skills like observing, describing and comparing data, formulating generalizations, or offering empirical arguments. 1. The Study of Language: Some Preliminary Remarks There are many ways to study language. One is to concentrate on what we may call "production" (what we say, write, etc. which plays a key role in human communication. Another is to try to characterize what makes that production possible: A knowledge internal to the mind brain of the speakers that yields that production. There has been and there is controversy on whether that knowledge is learnt (through conscious strategies, memorization, etc. or acquired unconsciously (through the exposition to language of a child within a linguistic community) There is This is a modified version of Chomsky et al. (2019) For readers that want to deepen into these matters, we recommend the volumes Bosque Gutierrez Rexach (2009) and Gallego (2016, 2020) which offer a more comprehensive and detailed discussion. We thank Ignacio Bosque, Elena Ciutescu, Roberta D'Alessandro, Lourdes Domenech, Edita Gutierrez, and Francesc Reina for comments to a previous version of this paper. This research has been partially supported by grants from the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (FFI201787140 C4 1 P) the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR634) and the Institucio Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avancats (ICREA Academia 2015) A Spanish version will appear in the Revista de la Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica (2020) 2 considerable evidence for the latter conclusion, and for the hypothesis that the faculty of language (and its actual manifestations, natural languages: English, Spanish, Tagalog, Warlpiri, etc. is an exclusively human cognitive capacity whose appearance is relatively recent on the evolutionary timescale (between 120.000 and 200.000 years, it seems; cf. Bolhuis et al. 2014, Berwick Chomsky 2016, Chomsky 2017b) Such line of thought goes back to Descartes' observation, in the Discours on Method, that "there are no men so dull witted or stupid that they are incapable of arranging various words together and forming an utterance from them in order to make their thoughts understood; whereas there is no other animal, however perfect and well endowed it may be, that can do the same." Universal Grammar (UG) is the label that has been used to design this crucial difference (having or not a languageready brain) in terms of cognitive capacity, between "us and them." Research on comparative cognition carried out for decades has backed up what Descartes pointed out: Only humans have a MENTAL GRAMMAR, also called ILANGUAGE, where the "I" stands for internal and individual (cf. Chomsky 1986) The notion of I language refers to a knowledge that allows speakers to generate and understand a potentially unbounded set of expressions. 3 GENERATIVE GRAMMAR is the study of UG. That is, of the linguistic capacity inasmuch as a component of human cognition. From that point of view, the study of language should focus on I Language (the internal, unconscious knowledge of a language) even though the main way to do it is through E Language (the actual manifestations of such knwoledge) In general, the investigation of an I Language has been carried out by acceptability judgments with minimal pairs like that in (1) (1) The evidence was {recovered *arrived} The contrast in (1) is not taught in high schools, nor in most (if not any at all) grammar textbooks. However, it is obvious to all speakers of English, and tells us that the presence of the unaccusative verb arrive in a passive structure violates some principle. 1 It also means intensional, but we put aside this notion to simplify the exposition. 2 This knowledge has also received the name of COMPETENCE, and was introduced as a technical term to avoid (largely philosophical) controversies about the very concept of 'knowledge. We avoid the use of this label, as it is currently related, especially in the education domain, with the execution of a skill (cf. Bosque Gallego 2018) 3 In the literature, I LANGUAGE is opposed to E LANGUAGE (where the "E" stands for externalized and extensional) "a collection of actions, or utterances, or linguistic forms (words, sentences) paired with meanings" (Chomsky 1986:19; cf. also Chomsky 2012a, 2017a) Despite its widespread use, it is not immediately obvious which expressions belong to so called E Language, so we will not make us of this notion here. 4 Unaccusative verbs are intransitive verbs that express a change of state or location. Their only argument is not interpreted as an agent (it is a /PACIENT/ o /THEME/ and since they cannot assign accusative (and, thereore, cannot have a Direct Object) they rule out passives. A Spanish version will appear in the Revista de la Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica (2020) 3 Apart from introspection, which is indiviudal (as we expect, as it is part of an ILanguage) and can be resorted to very easily, in recent years neurological and psychological experimental techniques have been developed that allow us to observe how language manifests in the brain (cf. Laka 2015, Berwick et al. 2013; Nelson et al. 2017; Friederici et al. 2017) The same can be said about language acquisition studies, which have shown that children produce, spontaneously (with no external stimuli or pressures) expressions with properties of languages different from the ones acquired by the environment. Crucially, expressions that deviate from general grammatical principles (of UG; Crain Thornton 1998, 2012, Crain et al. 2017) like those having to do with structure dependence, which we will review in section 5, are never produced. This point takes us directly to one of the main arguments in favor of the biological perspective of the study of language: The POVERTY OF STIMULUS (PoS; cf. Chomsky 2012b and Berwick et al. 2011 for an overview) PoS is concerned with the observation that environmental stimuli do not determine the development of organisms; for the most part, they do not come even close e.g. How does the nutritional input into an embryo determine whether it will grow into a cat or a monkey? This can be seen throughout biology (e.g. insect and vertebrate genomes give rise to different visual systems, independent of external stimuli) but also in language acquisition. A clear example is the difference between linear order and hierarchichal order, to which we return later. Every linguistic expression uttered or written is a unidimensional object in which words appear in a linear adjacency relationship that is, one after the other. But a linguistic expression is also a complex n dimensional object in virtue of hierarchichal relations that may or may not match a given linear order. For instance, the sentences in (2) and (3) although they display a different linear order (the object NP is to the right of the verb in (2) and to its left in (3) have the same hierarchichal order: (2) John has read the book [English] John auxiliar read the book 'John has read the book' (3) Jonek liburua irakurri du [Basque] Jon book read auxiliar 'Jon has read the book' Linearly, the V DO dependency of (2) and (3) is the opposite, but the meaning is the same. This tells us that the syntactic structure must be the same, one in which V For a more complete and accessible characterization of these verbs, we refer the reader to Bosque Gutierrez Rexach (2008) Gallego (2016) as well as RAE ASALE (2009) 5 Similar evidence is provided by spontaneous creation of sign languages by deaf children that never had linguistic input (cf. Feldman et al. 1978; Kegl. et al. 1999; Sandler Lillo Martin 2006) A Spanish version will appear in the Revista de la Sociedad Espanola de Linguistica (2020) 4 and DO form an abstract unit (a phrase) that leaves the subject aside: roughly, [Sub [V DO] But, of course, for that we have to assume that the syntax that is relevant for interpretation is encoded in terms of hierarchy and does not care about linear order, an idea that is questioned by many still nowadays others have not even heard of it, as it has not been brought up to them. In this paper we provide our vision of some of the aspects that should be taken into account for the study of language from a biological point of view. Many of them, we believe, could be naturally incorporated into Secondary Education. That would allow teenagers to study language not only as a means of communication or artistic creation (which justifies, at least in some countries, its intimate relation with literary and instrumental applied communicative approaches) but also as a window to the human mind and as a bridge between Humanities and Sciences. The paper is divided as follows: section 2 introduces the fundamental properties of human language, which are related to the operations relevant for the formation of syntactic structures and the Case and agreement dependencies (which determine syntactic functions) in section 3 we focus on the relations that syntax holds with the thought and externalization systems; section 4 discusses some optimal properties of language and the way in which they can make us establish connections with scientific disciplines; finally, section 5 summarizes