Language as nature and language as art
Year: 2000
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: ‘Nature’/’Nurture’ controversies have been perennial in the study of language, one of the oldest subjects of intellectual endeavor. The first half of this century saw us at the Nurture pole of the oscillation, the second half has placed us at the Nature pole. It would be desirable to escape this pendulum. The main current approach to ‘naturalizing’ language is what I shall call ‘Simple Nativism’. It holds that both in form (syntax) and content (semantics) language is essentially innate. Syntax is governed by an innate ‘Universal Grammar’, and the ideas encoded are just elements of the ‘Language of Thought’. The problem with this approach is that it minimizes the very substantial differences between languages in both form and content. An alternative strategy for naturalizing language is coevolutionary theory, which conceives of culture as a self-replicating track of information parallel to, and interacting with, the genome, but with faster rates of adaptation and change. On this view, language is a hybrid biological/cultural phenomenon, and the human language ability has a built-in expectation of variation. In the body of the paper, I focus on the issue of whether the content of linguistic categories is a direct projection from an innate ‘Language of Thought’. I review three conceptual domains (color, kinship and space) often claimed to be the locus of semantic universals and argue that the substantial variations across languages fits a coevolutionary perspective much better than a Simple Nativist one. Linguistic categories evolve to solve local adaptive problems, and they strongly influence the conceptual categories in which people think. I conclude that a coevolutionary perspective, by attempting to ‘naturalize Nurture’,
Author: Stephen C. Levinson
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W146455253