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UNFINISH: Language universals which are claimed to be innate
Abstract
In this text I will discuss some language universals which are claimed
to be innate, and how plausible this claim is.
1. Universals that are a result of the communication role of the
language
in of Language universals from its role in
communication I discuss what rules any language that is used for
communication has to follow. The following universals can be deduced
from the communicative role:
- language must have rules.
- Language must have have basic units, which have their own
meaning. For spoken language, these are the words (phrases with
a meaning that cannot be deduced from the basic units that make them
can also be regarded as basic units).
- Most of the of the messages are combinations of several words,
according to some rules (grammar).
- The basic structure of most of messages is association of some
object with attribute or effect.
- The rules of combinations are express by one of: meaning of the
words, word order, word modifications, special words, modification of
words by adding something.
- Semantic information normally used whenever it is available to
decide about the appropriate combination.
- Word order is used for simple and frequently used features of the
grammar.
- The grammar has to allow combining any message with more
information. (This includes the so-called 'recursion').
- The main bulk of words mean either an object, an attribute, an
action or an effect.
- The language must have tools to make identification of objects
efficient.
- The language must have a way to signify repeated reference to the
same object, and make it cheap.
- Languages are far from optimum.
Any language that is used for communication by humans must have these
features, independently on any innate rules. Therefore, finding these
rule does not support theirs innateness.
Other, more specific rules, are more difficult to predict directly
from the communicative role of language, because our understanding of
language and human cognitive performance is not good enough, but they
seems to be plausible. These include:
- The fixed location of a header in a phrase. This is an example
of using word order for combining the meaning of words to the
complete phrase. Fixed location in different types of phrases is
presumably less confusing than different word order for each kind of
phrase.
- Fixed order of subject, verb, object. Again, a usage of word
order.
Ignoring the fact that the communicative role of language imposes some
rules on it is a typical error of 'wrong null hypothesis', which is
quite common in cognitive psychology. (see
Reasoning errors for discussion).
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Yehouda Harpaz
yh@maldoo.com
3nov96
http://human-brain.org/