UNIVERZA V MARIBORU
FILOZOFSKA FAKULTETA
Oddelek za anglistiko in amerikanistiko
Seminar paper
“THE “LANGUAGE INSTINCT” DEBATE”
Predmet:
Temeljni jezikovni problemi v teoriji jezika
Nosilka:
Študentka:
Dr. Dunja Jutronić
Maja Juričinec
Maribor, 2008
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
SUMMARY OF THE FIRST CHAPTER:
“Culture or Biology?”
The third chapter of this book makes a reader wonder about when a
certain theory should be considered as well-grounded. One would expect
that in order for a specific theory to become valid and undoubtedly
accepted, it ought to be based not merely on numerous observations of
those who founded it, but also supported by recorded and further
investigated real-life examples. Sampson refers back to the Middle Ages
when ordinary people were not prepared to go into the fields to investigate
or use their own brains to think. That was the time when the authority of an
eminent predecessor seemed to outweigh their notion of the world.
Consequently many fanciful tales continued to be repeated and believed
as Sampson believes to be the case with the nativist story, with which his
book disagrees.
“The “Language Instinct” Debate” confutes the established nativist
theory, which claims human beings possess complex features of linguistic
structure encoded in our genes like a bird’s nest-building or a dog’s habit
of burying bones. Since Sampson perceives language as a cultural
creation which may be learnt during our lifetimes depending on the culture
one is born into, he is convinced no one is innately predisposed. Human’s
natural curiosity along with a propensity to come up with new ideas and
experiment, force nature to willingly or unwillingly answer the questions
raised. Experiments leave us only with prosperous ideas and winnow
away the mistaken ones, resulting in unsteady but cumulative growth of
human knowledge. The example supporting his theory is taken out of Willy
Russell’s play “Educating Rita”, a story about a naive and ignorant young
Liverpool hairdresser, who is determined to improve her unsatisfying life
by learning. Slowly and uncertainly Rita climbs intellectually proving that
mankind is capable of learning anything, starting from scratch. This
precise capability defies the belief of built-in knowledge in that it allows us
to adapt to different circumstances which according to Sampson is the
1
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
crucial difference between us and the animals. Nativists on the other hand
defend their point of view by claiming that our richer instinctive knowledge
base lets us do greater variety of things. Defying these assumptions
Samson argues that nor Rita or our ancestors, who began the longest
process of cultural development of which we benefit today, knew nothing
to start with. We as present-day descendants have not inherited
knowledge, but only the ability to gain knowledge.
While nativism is based on the idea of knowledge being biologically
built-in or native to human mind, Sampson as an empiricist sees human
knowledge as a cultural product – the outcome of many generations of
trail-and-error experimentation. The first languages were those that
changed the process of getting knowledge from an individual to a
communal activity, therefore they are considered as the most significant
cultural innovations. A newborn baby gains its knowledge in the same way
as our first human ancestors did: through their own testing of their own
guesses. The advantage of the succeeding generations is that they do not
have to go back to the start and go through the same painful knowledgewinning as our prior generations had to. Their process of guessing and
experimentation can continue where there elders left off. To the contrary,
nativists believe that human beings have biologically inherited knowledge
base along with its biologically inherited coding system. They are
convinced that facts about human language such as its structure and the
manner in which children acquire their mother tongue offer the only
reasonable explanation to an unprejudiced eye that knowledge cannot be
perceived otherwise than biologically inherited. They support their
arguments by saying that children would not be as good at learning the
language if they had to learn it from scratch. Nativists, who examined
various languages of the world claim to have found such structural
similarities between them which cannot be ascribed as cultural
achievement.
Sampson calls the movement of “linguistic nativism” a revival, for
nativistic way of thinking started long ago with its beginner Plato who was
convinced that we have immortal souls that remembered things from a
2
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
former and more perfect life than this one. According to that belief learning
is just a recollection.
A French thinker of the 17th century, René Descartes, had a more
Christian perspective about the extent of our innate knowledge saying that
the ideas present in the mind of a child were put there by God himself. The
experience after birth is merely answering the question whether the
possible propositions are either “true” or “false”.
Despite the different approaches to the similar idea, they both
agreed that a newborn child is like a very learned man who is asleep,
meaning that the knowledge is in there somewhere, but it needs
awakening before it is available for use.
As a representative of an opposite point of view called empiricism,
Sampson mentions Descartes’ English contemporary John Locke, who
argued that knowledge is generated by experience. The fact that Locke’s
view prevailed as the default one for almost 300 years has probably much
to do with his liberal theory of politics which became the accepted political
ideal in all English speaking countries. Empiricism and liberal politics
share the same idea that where authoritative knowledge is not given in
advance, the freedom to experiment is necessary.
The man who initiated linguistic nativism was Noam Chomsky now
followed by Steven Pinker and other currently active nativists, who in order
to backup their own standpoints rely heavily on Chomsky’s writings and
his arguments for nativism.
Long before Chomsky with his style of analysing language came
along the scientific study of language was seen as a branch of social
anthropology. The duty of the ones studying the intricate grammatical and
phonetic detail found in any human language was to emphasize the
amazing diversity of languages which did not originate from a common
ancestor language.
Chomsky on the other hand thought quite the opposite: he focused
on what languages have in common. According to Chomsky, the great
amount of encountered similarities (also among languages that have
developed separately) can only be explained in terms of innate linguistic
3
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
knowledge. However, he believes that the ability to acquire language in
spite of its innateness is much greater before the puberty. Moreover, in his
opinion grammar grows in one’s mind the same as teeth grow in one’s
mouth.
Sampson objects to this saying that if this were true, we would
expect everyone to grow up speaking the same language, but we do not.
“A newborn English child, brought up in a Chinese environment by
Chinese-speaking foster parents, will become a fluent Chinese and
not a fluent English speaker (and vice versa).” [Sampson 9]
Chomsky considers these differences between languages as
superficial details claiming that underlying structural principles are
common to all the languages on Earth. As biology prescribes that we shall
speak language it also leaves some matters open, which have to be
learned by experience after a child is born. Some sceptics object to
Chomsky’s usage of the word knowledge. Their definition of having
knowledge of something means that one is able to answer questions on it.
Therefore, Chomsky’s definition of the human ability to assemble words
into meaningful sentences without being aware of the rules they are
following is called “tacit knowledge”. Many of those who failed to
understand Chomsky’s message have argued against him, but have
eventually lost the linguistic battle and nativism remained as the prevailing
scientific study of language. Later, in the Margaret Thatcher’s years when
Chomsky was fully occupied by his own politics one heard less and less of
him and consequently of linguistic nativism. Soon, the new generation of
linguistic nativists has won the readers with their much more appealing
manner of writing supported by everyday examples. Outrunning numerous
nativists like Derek Bickerton, Michael LaBarbera, Ray Jackendoff and
many others was Chomsky’s younger Canadian colleague Steven Pinker
with his book in 1994 called “The Language Instinct”. Pinker’s fascinating
language study is assembled into a pattern designed to convince a new
generation that we speak because of the inherited “language instinct”.
4
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
Even though Sampson gives Pinker the credit for a well written and
fully researched book, he suggests that the conclusions drawn from the
research are quite wrong, for according to Sampson there is no such thing
as a human language instinct. To make their writings more valid recent
nativists include plenty of footnotes referring to Chomsky’s works as if they
were established scientific findings from the past.
John Locke being the first person in the modern world arguing
against innate knowledge, Sampson adopted his point of view on human
nature. However, “the best individual guide to the general nature of human
intellectual activity”, as Sampson names him, is a philosopher Sir Karl
Popper. The latter was convinced that true science was all about making
risky guesses about various matters and then testing these guesses to
obtain at least the provisional objective results that may sooner or later be
refuted. Based on guessing and testing assumption Popper sees the
newborn baby as having innate expectations which generate different
hypothesis about the external world. Through trial and error principle child
becomes aware of guesses that work, consequently the structure of
knowledge the child posses elaborates increasingly. One of my favourite
sentences in this book was the one in which Sampson describes a child as
a little research scientist full of energetic research ideas that needs to be
tried out. Since progress comes only through making mistakes, errors are
not things to be avoided, but things that enlighten us so we can profit from
them. This is basically the same aspect that we learned during our course
of didactics of English where we said that mistakes are allowed and
accepted, because they are believed to encourage the child’s progress.
5
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
SUMMARY OF THE SECOND CHAPTER:
“The Original Arguments for a Language Instinct”
We know for a fact that no child speaks a language at birth. By
being raised in any speech community, children without physical
disabilities become competent users of the language spoken within their
society. Nativists and empiricists have divergent aspects of human
language and the cognitive achievements, which depend on language.
While the former advocate that these are products of biology, the latter
perceive language almost as a wholly cultural product. None of the two
opponents confute that human beings posses some innate abilities. The
task of learning and grown up human’s cognitive world depends in some
respect on his experience. Since Chomsky does not disregard other views
on language as logically coherent, Sampson refutes Chomsky’s theory of
innate knowledge of language by responding to each of his seven
postulates.
Chomsky’s premisses
1 Speed of acquisition
In his first postulate Chomsky argues that the speed of language
acquisition is faster than one would expect considering the complexity of
language system and also faster than the acquisition of knowledge of
physics.
Sampson argues this belief based on the fact that it takes
approximately two years before children master the main grammatical
structures of their mother tongue. So the question arises: how long should
a period of time for acquiring language be before Chomsky would no
longer see the acquisition as “remarkably fast”. One of the possible
reasons for the success of Chomsky’s explanation might be the fact that
adults tend to become emotional when it comes to small children and
praise their every rate of progress. It seems like Chomsky does not
6
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
acknowledge the difference between the “tacit” and the “explicit
knowledge” of an individual. “Tacit knowledge” enables us to appropriately
conform to our linguistic environment, while “explicit knowledge” means we
are consciously aware of the structure of a language and this one is
certainly not acquired universally or rapidly. Therefore, if we are to
compare the speed of language acquisition with the knowledge of physics,
we are bound to compare them only on the “tacit knowledge” level, for who
can say that abilities as pouring the liquid without spilling it or succeeding
throwing a ball roughly where we want it to go require more time to acquire
than the ability to speak. In order to perform these physical activities one
has to move from observation to some tacit grasp of general principles of
physics. The author believes that the two bodies of knowledge can be
compared only if they are equal or at least close to equal. So to label
grammar “as complex as” atomic physics it would be as meaningless as
the statement that the novel War and Peace is twice long as the River
Nile.
2 Age dependence
Chomsky and other linguistic nativists differ between the terms
language acquisition and learning, the former term being the process by
which someone becomes a competent user of his mother tongue. They
believe that human ability to acquire either a first or a second language
diminishes sharply by puberty or somewhat earlier. Empiricists on the
other hand do not distinguish between the two expressions; as far as they
are concerned everything is learned.
The results of empirical researches on factors affecting secondlanguage learning successfully refute Chomsky’s claim about agedependence. As adults can learn a second language relatively easily and
rapidly if they see the task as worthwhile, the children whose motivation to
study a foreign language is poor, will absorb very little and accordingly
achieve far less than a native mastery. The most commonly discussed
example is the case of “Genie”, the daughter of an insane father who kept
her in isolation from human interaction until the authorities discovered her
7
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
at the age of 13. Susan Curtiss, who documented Genie’s progress, saw
her as a case in which language acquisition was possible after the “critical
period”. Genie’s language-learning progress as well as the development of
her social skills was not as successful as they could be if she had not
suffered great emotional damage caused by deprivation of normal social
stimulation. These emotional scars are also evident in Genie’s retreat from
her progress when the funding for research on her ran out and she had to
move from one bad foster home to another, when she refused to say a
word. Various papers published years later, long after Curtiss was
observing Genie were much more supportive of nativism, but since there
was no new data, these responses do not count as valid.
Eric Lennenberg shared his view of language acquisition with
Chomsky, whose findings could probably also apply to learning in general.
Lennenberg implied that there are probably numerous tasks and skills,
apart from language acquisition, that have no age limitation. Sampson
agrees with Lennenberg if he meant that one has to; for example, develop
the physical strength in order to acquire skill at archery. As far as
intellectual tasks are concerned Jerome Bruner states:
“Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest
form to any child at any stage of development.” [Sampson 42]
3 Poverty of data
Sampson examines the issue of the real-life evidence, which he
calls the “poverty-of-data” argument. Nativists believe that people must be
born knowing much of the structure of language for children accomplish to
master some of the structures of their mother tongue they never hear in
their elders’ usage. Sampson tries to prove that everyday linguistic
experience is far richer than the nativists assume.
Amongst Chomsky’s attempts to support his belief about language
innateness is the one in which he claims that even though the amount of
exposure to language during child’s acquisition period is quantitatively
8
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
meagre and qualitatively degenerate, the child is capable of deriving
general rules about the structure of their first language. Researches on the
nature of speech addressed to children indicate that the quality of the so
called Motherese is far better than any of the nativists supposed. Since the
speech of the child’s elders includes “defective sentences” as well as
accurate utterances, nativists reject the theory of parents being ideal
language teachers. They believe that a child lacking innate linguistic
knowledge would be susceptible to those ungrammatical utterances.
Virginia Valiant perceives Motherese as ungrammatical only in a sense of
standard written English, but at that stage a child is learning to speak
English and not write it; therefore informal spoken sentences beginning
with a verb are acceptable and also grammatical in a spoken sense (e.g.
“Want your lunch now?”).
In arguing against Chomsky, the author takes Chomsky's much
used example of English speaking children determining how to ask yes/no
questions. He is seeking to show that Chomsky is being dishonest in his
analysis by not verifying the data.
By investigating the grammar of yes/no questions in English
Chomsky came up with two alternative hypotheses that a child might try:
1.) “operate on the first finite verb”,
2.) “operate on the finite verb of the main clause”.
Sampson refutes the first one saying that it violates the “structuredependence” universal adding:
“The only sentences which reveal the falsity of (1) are yes/no
questions formed from statements containing a subordinate clause
which precedes the main verb.” [Sampson 45]
Although hypothesis (2) proves to be correct, there are still some yes/no
questions that fail to distinguish between the two hypotheses. According to
Sampson these are simple statements along with the complex ones in
which the main verb precedes all the possible subordinate clauses.
A child working out how to make a yes/no question in English has
to work out that if any verb is to be moved it has to be the verb in the main
9
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
clause and not just the first verb encountered in the sentence. In order to
work this out, a child would have to distinguish between verbs and other
words and also between main verbs and auxiliary verbs as well as
knowing the structure of the phrases in the sentence.
Chomsky's claim is that a child determines the rule of yes/no
question formation even before it may encounter such questions in the
language it hears. Sampson argues that such sentences are indeed
present in the language that children hear. The point that the author is
trying to prove is that all children hear this crucial form of yes/no question
before they determine the yes/no question formation rule.
Later in his book Sampson introduces findings of Betty Hart and
Todd Risley’s research on how much wording children are typically
exposed to in the early years indicating that it considerably depends on
social class. The most linguistically deprived three-year-olds are those
from “families on welfare” for they might have heard “only” 10 million
words, while for children from working-class families the figure would be
around 20 million words. The most “fortunate” seem to be children raised
in a professional households, whose total exposure is estimated to be 30
million words by the age of three. Based on experience people often begin
to use a new word after encountering it just once or a handful of times, so
Sampson sees no reason why learning a new grammatical construction
from experience should require a far greater exposure than learning a new
word.
4 Convergence among grammars
The fourth argument the book deals with is the notion that
children of varying levels of intelligence and different exposure to
language inputs, converge on the same grammar, meaning that they all
acquire essentially the same language that their elders speak and never
fail the task. According to Sampson, Chomsky has at one point permitted
the possibility that educated people might be better at mastering their
mother tongue (p.50). However, individuals with lower intelligence do
10
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
acquire quite a lot of language skills for their motive to learn is to
participate in society’s communicative activities.
Chomsky’s second argument claims that even though different
children are exposed to different finite samples of the language, they all
end up acquiring near-identical grammars. Since people give different
grammatical judgments in response to the same data, Sampson believes
that people do not actually converge on the same grammar as Chomsky
proposes.
The book refers to Labov's investigation of individuals’ grammars,
where respondents varied in their judgments about the grammaticality of
presented sentences. All 24 subjects asked to judge a word sequence
”Every one of the boys didn’t go there.” understood oral and written the
instructions, which they were given concerning the test. It is hard to see
how they could all have the same understanding of what was said to them
unless they had pretty much the same grammars.
In Sampson’s opinion the only thing individuals’ differing
judgments show is that what is being tested is not the individual's
competence but their performance. The fact that there is a variation in the
reported judgments does not in fact constitute the argument against
convergence among grammars – it is not a test of grammars but rather a
test of performance.
5 Language universals
Sampson is convinced that universal aspects of human languages
speak in favour of empiricists supporting their view of human nature.
Chomsky himself claimed in 1975 that an innatist hypothesis is, in terms of
violation of language universals, a refutable one. Sampson is not rejecting
Chomsky’s claim that human languages all share significant structural
properties, maybe not necessarily all of those that Chomsky and the other
nativists have claimed, yet he merely believes there is a better explanation
to it than the hypothesis of innate language knowledge.
According to the languages being investigated, Chomsky believes
that human languages all share certain structural properties. One could
11
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
easily accept that, but before we are satisfied with Chomsky’s offered
theory we should take into consideration all possible explanations.
One of the language universals is the tree structure in grammar.
Sentences consist of words grouped into phrases and clauses nesting
inside one another. Chomsky implied that tree structuring in grammar is
not a logical necessity, but an empirical finding not realizing that he was
the first who classified different types of grammatical system with the help
of his elaborated mathematical scheme. Popper and Sampson perceive
the universality of tree structuring as a proof that languages are systems
developed by human being gradually the same as every other knowledge
is. No one doubts in tree structure of all languages. What Sampson
demonstrates is that syntactic structure is not an argument for the
language organ. He follows a parable about two watchmakers by Herbert
Simon originally applied to economics where the only, though essential
difference between the two kinds of watches is that one are hierarchically
structured while the others are not. The main point of the parable is that
complex entities produced by an undirected process will result in tree
structuring. He namely believes that building things up out of smaller
components is the most efficient way of achieving that complexity. Darwin
explained that in terms of evolutionary process, meaning that organisms of
increasing complexity would endure through time. As in evolutionary
process where simpler cells are gradually replaced by more complex ones
which later develop in even more complex organisms, the structure of
human
language
works
in
approximately
the
same
tree-shaped
structuring.
In Derek Bickerton’s opinion we can study the way language was
first developed by our distant forefathers by observing one-word
sentences of a child at 21 months like: “Get.” “Apple.” or “Wash” “Baby”.
When these sentences prove to work, a grammatical rule would come to
existence and the two separate words would usually be upgraded into twoword utterances: “Get apple.” “Wash baby.”. If we look at both of the twoword sentences we can assume that our ancestors would begin to work
according to “verb” and ”noun” classification. The main point is that if
gradual guess-and-test development of languages is correct than the
12
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
language grammar will be hierarchically structured and this is the same
way in which we must build up our understanding of our mother tongue.
So it is no surprise that today’s children try to apply tree structure on
languages they learn; previous generations have done the same. For
being able to draw the correlation between the evolutionary development
and hierarchical structure, we ought to thank Herbert Simon.
Nativists’ theory of language universals does not contain a concrete
description of an individual language. It does not tell us things like with
which letter a specific word begins or ends or that an adjective universally
goes before the noun and so on. This is because properties of this sort are
not universal among all human languages – French for example uses
quite the opposite rule for adjectives. Since Sampson sees languages as
products of cultural development reconstructed by individuals through a
Popperian process of guessing and testing, properties of languages that
coincide occur by chance, or through the mechanisms of cultural
transmission. The author says that if human beings had innate knowledge
of language as Chomsky predicted, a baby separated at birth from its
biological parents would be influenced by the same language its biological
parents speak, yet we know that a child reconstructs the language it
hears.
Central to Pinker’s case for nativism are tree structuring and
structure dependence; though the very first study he discusses are Joseph
Greenbergs’s universals of word order of languages from diverse areas of
the world. Sampson however thinks that Greenberg’s findings do little to
support the nativist case apart from providing the readers fond of nativist
theory with concrete examples. Nativists discuss different types of
universals in their books. Pinker, for example, writes plenty about
Greenberg’s universal claiming that subjects precede object in almost all
languages. If we think of the subject as the element with which the verb
agrees, that cannot be count as a language universal, because we know
languages in which verbs do not inflect at all. Take for example an English
sentence: “John was killed”. Another such idea on which Pinker spends
13
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
his time on is that human beings cannot cope with multiple central
embeddings, such as
“The malt that the rat that the cat killed ate lay in the house”.
[Sampson 160]
Sampson argues that by saying that one can easily stumble upon
multiple central embeddings in writings for adults (The Times) and children
as well as in student essays and spoken utterances, moreover they are
understandable. To support his argument he quotes a sentence from a
published academic article about linguistics written by a Canadian:
“The only thing that the words that can lose –d have in common is,
apparently, that they are all quite common words.” [Sampson 160]
Bickerton’s scrutinizing of various human languages led him to
conclude that all words fall into hierarchal relationships, as for example
dog is the “superordinate” term for spaniel. He suggests that in human
languages all words have superordinates. Sampson, however, does not
agree with Bickerton claiming that the superordinate term for carpet does
not exist, although some might perceive a carpet as a piece of furniture. In
addition, he challenges the reader to find his own example of a word that
has no superordinate.
Sampson sums up the discussion about language universals
using the following words:
"Yes, there are universal features in human languages, but what
they mainly show is that human beings have to learn their mother
tongues from scratch rather than having knowledge of language
innate in their minds." [Sampson 166]
14
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
6 Non-linguistic analogies
The number system is in Chomsky’s opinion common and unique to
all humans. He perceives the essence of the number system as the
concept of adding one, indefinitely. As far as Sampson is concerned these
claims are false. Infinity in the way that Chomsky describes it is a
mathematical conception, which is usually too abstract for an average
person to comprehend. The author is aware that the modern European
number system does not result from our experience of the physical world.
Since the concept of infinity was developed in the mid-nineteenth century,
Sampson implies a question of whether “…our own ancestor until a few
centuries ago were less than fully human with respect to their cognitive
equipment?” (p. 53). Accordingly, he perceives the notion of infinity as a
case of cultural development.
7 Species-specificity
Ancient observations show that only human beings possess
language. This suggests that there is some genetically encoded property
of the species that is essential to the acquisition of language. Regarding
the evolutionary process and the presumption that our first remote
ancestors were apes, a number attempts have been made in teaching
language or language-like systems (sign language, a series of colored
plastic tokens etc.) to chimpanzees (Vicky, Washoe, Sarah, Lana etc.) and
other apes. Some success has been achieved, but Chomsky describes
these experiments as unsuccessful, claiming that nevertheless the access
to language experience was comparable to those available to human
children the apes did not surpass the language mastery of a two-year-old
child. It seems as if the results gained are irrelevant to nativist case.
Studies have shown that the adult human ability to speak may
besides the cognitive development of the brains be also ascribed to
human vocal tract differing in shape from those of other primates. Having
the shape of vocal tract as we do enables us to speak, but the other hand
one can choke to death on food lodged in the windpipe.
15
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
CONCLUSION
»The »Language Instinct« Debate« systematically lists all the
separate strands of argument that Chomsky uses in his various writings to
infer innate knowledge/ideas from observable facts about language.
Sampson represents the nativists' positions fairly and even finds himself in
agreement with some of their less central ideas. I find criticisms of “speed
of acquisition”, “age-dependence” and “poverty of data” persuasive, but it
also depends on one’s viewpoint. If a teacher of English would try to
oppose the nativist theory he/she could say that a foreign language
learner interested in learning English is a fast one, if it took him/her less
than two years to master the basic structures of English grammar along
with quite a great amount of English vocabulary. However, one could
recognize this rapid progress of learning as a language universal meaning
that the learner has already acquired one language (his/hers mother
tongue) from which he can derive the properties of a second language.
Anyhow, I find the book worth reading, because it provides a view
of how human languages work without appealing to nativist assumptions.
It cautions that scientific arguments should be based on reliable data and
that linguistics is no exception. Corpus linguistics makes available many
tools for finding examples needed in linguistic study, and linguists should
use those resources in addition to introspective and experimental data.
However, empirical data can answer some questions, but not all of them.
It seems to me that both positions are too extreme and absolute,
so the correct solution can often be found between two extremes. Perhaps
one of the central tasks of linguists is to find the balancing point between
these two extremes, where the solution may well lie.
16
»THE »Language Instinct« DEBATE«
Maja Juričinec
Works cited and referred too:
Cowie, Fiona. What’s within?: Nativism reconsidered. New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
Sampson, Geoffrey. “The ‘Language Instinct’ Debate”.
http://www.grsampson.net/BLID.html
“language instinct’ debate, The Geoffrey Sampson review”.
http://www.mouthshut.com/productreviews/language_Instinct%27_Debate___The_-_Geoffrey_Sampson925058242.html
Liu, Haitao. “Review of the Language Instinct Debate”.
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?SubID=60828
17