Modern Linguistics Foundation and Amazon Tribe

by ; By Brandon Keim

Wired Science - (Amazon Tribe Shakes Foundation of Modern Linguistics): "According to Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories, humans have evolved to possess an innate, biological set of grammatical 'building blocks' of which recursion -- the ability to insert one phrase inside another -- is perhaps the most fundamental. But an isolated Amazon tribe speaks a language without recursion, and they are, in the words of cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, 'a bomb thrown into the party' of modern linguistics"

So what does this mean?

Chomsky's absolutely correct to recognize the importance of recursion, but the role that he gives it, and the role that Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch give it, to me has got things backwards. In other words, rather than going from language to the brain, we have to have recursion in language, and then it starts to make its manifestation in other thought processes. It starts in the thought processes and it might or might not jump to language. It does not seem to be an essential property of language, certainly not the essential property of language.

So the evidence is still being collected, the claims that I have made about Pirahã lacking recursion and the fact that Pirahã is an evidence that there probably isn't a need for universal grammar. Contrary to Chomsky's proposal that universal grammar is the best way to think about where language comes from, another possibility is just that humans have different brains that are different globally from those of other species, that they have a greater general intelligence that can be exploited for all sorts of purposes in human thinking and human problem-solving. And one of the biggest problems we have to solve is how to communicate with other people—our conspecifics—and communication with our conspecifics is a problem that's often solved by recursion, but it doesn't have to be solved that way, it can be solved in other ways, especially in very small societies where so much information is implicit and held in common.


Relate Link :

Amazone : takes refuge from the authorities and womenfolk in the Amazonian forest (film)