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The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science

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The Myth of Language Universals: Language Diversity and Its Importance for Cognitive Science BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2009) 32, 429–492 doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999094X The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science Nicholas Evans Department of Linguistics, Research School of Asian and Pacific Studies, Australian National University, ACT 0200, Australia [email protected] http://rspas.anu.edu.au/people/personal/evann_ling.php Stephen C. Levinson Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, NL-6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands; and Radboud University, Department of Linguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands [email protected] http://www.mpi.nl/Members/StephenLevinson Abstract: 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. Keywords: Chomsky; coevolution; constituency; culture; dependency; evolutionary theory; Greenberg; linguistic diversity; linguistic typology; recursion; universal grammar 1. Introduction universals. Structural differences should instead be accepted for what they are, and integrated into a new approach to language and cognition that places diversity According to Chomsky, a visiting Martian scientist would surely conclude that aside from their mutually unintelligible vocabularies, at centre stage. Earthlings speak a single language. The misconception that the differences between — Steven Pinker (1994, p. 232) languages are merely superficial, and that they can be resolved by postulating a more abstract formal level at Languages are much more diverse in structure than cogni- which individual language differences disappear, is tive scientists generally appreciate. A widespread assump- serious: it now pervades a great deal of work done in tion among cognitive scientists, growing out of the psycholinguistics, in theories of language evolution, generative tradition in linguistics, is that all languages language acquisition, neurocognition, parsing and speech are English-like but with different sound systems and recognition, and just about every branch of the cognitive vocabularies. The true picture is very different: languages sciences. Even scholars like Christiansen and Chater differ so fundamentally from one another at every level of (2008), concerned to demonstrate the evolutionary impossi- description (sound, grammar, lexicon, meaning) that it is bility of pre-evolved constraints, employ the term Universal very hard to find any single structural property they Grammar as if it were an empirically verified construct. A share. The claims of Universal Grammar, we argue here, great deal of theoretical work within the cognitive sciences are either empirically false, unfalsifiable, or misleading thus risks being vitiated, at least if it purports to be investi- in that they refer to tendencies rather than strict gating a fixed human language processing capacity, rather # Cambridge University Press, 2009 0140-525X/09 $40.00 429 Evans & Levinson: The myth of language universals than just the particular form this takes in some well-known psychologists learned from the linguistic wars of the 1970s languages like English and Japanese. (Newmeyer 1986) to steer clear from too close an associ- How did this widespread misconception of language uni- ation with any specific linguistic theory, the underlying formity come about? In part, this can be attributed simply idea that all languages share the same structure at some to ethnocentrism – most cognitive scientists, linguists abstract level has remained pervasive, tying in nicely to included, speak only the familiar European languages, all the modularity arguments of recent decades (Fodor 1983). close cousins in structure. But in part it can be attributed It will take a historian of science to unravel the causes to misleading advertizing copy issued by linguists them- of this ongoing presumption of underlying language uni- selves. Unfortunate sociological splits in the field have left formity. But a major reason is simply that there is a lack generative and typological linguists with completely differ- of communication between theorists in the cognitive ent views of what is proven science, without shared rules sciences and those linguists most in the know about lin- of argumentation that would allow them to resolve the guistic diversity. This is partly because of the reluctance issue – and in dialogue with cognitive scientists it has by most descriptive and typological linguists to look up been the generativists who have been taken as representing from their fascinating particularistic worlds and engage the dominant view. As a result, Chomsky’s notion of Univer- with the larger theoretical issues in the cognitive sal Grammar (UG) has been mistaken, not for what it is – sciences. Outsiders have instead taken the articulate namely, the programmatic label for whatever it turns out envoys from the universalizing generativist camp to to be that all children bring to learning a language – but represent the consensus view within linguistics. But for a set of substantial research findings about what all there are other reasons as well: the relevant literature languages have in common. For the substantial findings is forbiddingly opaque to outsiders, bristling with about universals across languages one must turn to the arcane phonetic symbols and esoteric terminologies. field of linguistic typology, which has laid bare a bewildering Our first goal (sect. 2) in this article, then, is to survey range of diverse languages, where the generalizations are some of the linguistic diversity that has been largely really quite hard to extract. Chomsky’s views, filtered ignored in the cognitive sciences, which shows how differ- through various commentators, have been hugely influen- ently languages can be structured at every level: phonetic, tial in the cognitive sciences, because they combine philoso- phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic. We phically sophisticated ideas and mathematical approaches critically evaluate (sect. 3) the kind of descriptive general- to structure with claims about the innate endowment for izations (again, misleadingly called “universals”) that have language that are immediately relevant to learning theorists, emerged from careful cross-linguistic comparisons, and cognitive psychologists, and brain scientists. Even though we survey the treacherously different senses of “universal” that have allowed the term to survive a massive accumu- lation of counterevidence. NICHOLAS EVANS is Professor of Linguistics at the We then turn to three syntactic features that have Australian National University. His more than 120 recently figured large in debates about the origin of linguistic publications include grammars of Kayardild language: grammatical relations (sect. 4), constituency and Bininj Gun-wok; dictionaries of Kayardild and (sect. 5), and recursion (sect. 6). How universal are these Dalabon; edited books on polysynthesis, linguistic pre- features? We conclude that there are plenty of languages history, and grammar-writing; and the recent Dying that do not exhibit them in their syntax. What does it Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have mean for an alleged universal to not apply in a given To Tell Us (Wiley Blackwell, 2009). He has carried out case? We will consider the idea of “parameters” and the intensive fieldwork on a number of languages of Australia and Papua New Guinea. Current research projects focus idea of UG as a “toolkit” (Jackendoff 2002). on the encoding of psychosocial cognition in grammar, We then turn (sect. 7) to the question of how all this song language traditions of Arnhem Land, and languages diversity is to be accounted for. We suggest, first, that lin- of South Coast New Guinea. Evans is a fellow of the guistic diversity patterns just like biological diversity and Australian Academy of the Humanities. should be understood in the same sorts of ways, with func- tional pressures
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