A reference in the blog Babel's Dawn alerted me to an interesting paper "An anthropic principle in lieu of a "Universal Grammar" by Hubert Haider, Department of Linguistics & Centre of Neuroscience at the the University of Salzberg.
Haidar starts by asking three questions:
Among the many unanswered questions in grammar theory, the following figure prominently.
- First, what is it that enables children to successfully cope with the structural complexities of their mother tongue while professional grammarians tend to fail when modelling them?
- Second, what determines the narrow system corridor for human grammars?
- Third, are the grammars of human languages the offspring of a single proto-grammar instantiating a "Universal Grammar" (monogenic) or are the shared traits of human grammars the result of convergent changes in the grammars of human languages of diverse ancestry (polygenic)?
The last of these questions is mainly concerned with debunking the ideas of Chomsky and I will pass over it in this blog post. More importantly he argues strongly that natural language and the grammars associated with them are due to normal evolutionary forces and are limited by the resources present in the human brain. He does not detail the nature of the resources provided by the brain - which is very relevant to my research into the evolution of human intelligence. For this reason I quote extracts from his text below, and then give a brief example of how my model demonstrates the way in which the neural network in the brain supports the resources his approach needs to support language .
