The Language Myth Chapter1

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Title Name: Evans
Language and mind rethought
This is a book about language, and about its relationship with

thought and the mind. It is also a book about how we acquire
language, and why different languages are so diverse in their
sound systems, vocabularies and grammars. Language is central
to our lives, and is arguably the cultural tool that sets humans, us,
apart from any other species. And on some accounts, language
is the symbolic behaviour that allowed human singularities art,
religion and science to occur.1 In her Nobel Prize acceptance
speech, the celebrated African-American writer, Toni Morrison,
put things this way: We die. That may be the meaning of life.
But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.2
Language is clearly a big deal.
This book addresses a controversy that has raged in the behavioural and brain sciences since the middle of the last century:
is language innate, something we are born with? Or does language
emerge from use, based on more general mental skills and abilities? The dominant view, until recently, has been the former: we
come into the world hard-wired with the rudiments of language.
But this view now looks to be on increasingly shaky ground.
But what might it mean to claim that language is innate?
Clearly our species, Homo sapiens, is biologically pre-prepared
to acquire language in a way no other species is: we have evolved
the articulatory capabilities to produce a complex set of distinct
and discrete sound units and these sound units vary from
language to language; we have the musculature to control and
facilitate the production of these sounds; we have the memory
capabilities to produce and recall sequences of sounds in order to
facilitate well-formed strings of sounds, making grammatically
well-formed sentences; and we have complex statistical processing
abilities allowing us both to perceive and to recognise sequences of
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Title Name: Evans
language and mind rethought
sounds. Crucially, we recognise fellow humans as being intentional agents, and, hence, are predisposed to interpret their sound
sequences as meaningful. And, most signicant of all, any given
speech community has agreed a bewilderingly complex set of linguistic conventions a language is nothing more than a set of linguistic
conventions allowing us to transmit and comprehend complex
ideas: in English we agree that the sound units that make up the
word cat represent the idea that is associated with the sound
segments that in French are signalled orthographically as chat, or
in Hindi as billi.
Conventional wisdom has maintained, over and above this
physiological pre-preparedness for language, that we are born
with a set of grammatical rules (universal knowledge structures),
stored somewhere in our minds, that allow us to acquire grammar
almost effortlessly. The idea is that the grammar that underlies
all of the 7,000 or so of the worlds languages is essentially the
same. In short, our species has evolved a specialised grammar
module, embedded in our brains, and genetically encoded. And
this provides us with the ability to acquire language in the rst
place: our grammar faculty is in place at birth.
This idea is often referred to as Universal Grammar: all human
languages, no matter the variety we happen to end up speaking,
are essentially the same. Whether someone learns English,
Japanese, Swahili, Tongan or whatever, when you get down to it,
they are all alike. Sure, each of these languages has different
vocabularies. And each language makes use of a different,
although partially overlapping, set of sounds. But underneath it
all, the essential ingredient of language our grammar is preprogrammed in the human genome: we are all born to produce
language because of our common genetic heritage, our Universal
Grammar. Just as all of us grow distinctively human organs
brains, livers, hearts and kidneys so too we develop language:
a consequence of our grammar organ, which grows in the human
brain, and which no other species possesses. And it is this innately
specied knowledge of grammar that underpins our ability to
develop and acquire language any language in the rst place.

Title Name: Evans
Language and mind rethought
This book, and the range of ideas I cover, are presented from
the perspective of linguistics the scientic study of language
my home discipline. While linguistics covers many more areas
and sub-disciplines than are represented here, Ive chosen the
range of topics on show, in the chapters to follow, for a very
specic reason. The majority of the evidence, viewed with objective eyes, now appears to show that language is not innate in the
way just outlined.
In a nutshell, I aim to convince you of the following: language
doesnt arise from innately programmed knowledge of human
grammar, a so-called Universal Grammar. I will argue that
language reects and builds upon general properties and abilities
of the human mind specically our species-specic cultural
intelligence; it reects human pro-social inclinations for intersubjective communication. I will seek to persuade you that when
we acquire language in infancy, we do so by acquiring the language of our parents and caregivers, painstakingly, and by making
many mistakes in the process. Language is not something that
emerges automatically, and effortlessly. It arises primarily from
the language input we are exposed to, from which we construct
our mother tongue. Moreover, human infants, I will show, are
not empty vessels that come empty-handed to the language learning process. We come ready-equipped with a battery of various
general learning mechanisms that make us adept at acquiring our
mother tongue(s).
But why should this discussion matter at all? Why should we
care? The study of language, for perhaps obvious reasons, is
central to a great many other disciplines; after all, if language is
the hallmark of what it means to be human, if it is the measure
of our lives, then this stands to reason. And because of the
centrality of language to all else, it is crucial our understanding
of it is accurate. It is also critical that we understand how language
relates to other aspects of mental function and social life. And
perhaps more than this: language is an index of our very humanity. What would Shakespeare be without his ability to invent, and
re-invent the human psyche through language? Language is more

Title Name: Evans
than the paradigm example of cultural behaviour, one that sets us

apart from any other species on the planet. We all have a vested
interest in it: it makes us who we are, and allows us to explore
ourselves: our emotional highs and lows. We should all care about
language, even when we take it for granted, for without it we are
barely human.
And here is the really important part. While I, and a great many
other professional linguists, now think the old view is wrong,
nevertheless, the old view Universal Grammar: the eponymous
language myth still lingers; despite being completely wrong, it is
alive and kicking. I have written this book to demonstrate exactly
why the old view is a myth; and to show what the reality is. This
book is thus a users manual for all language users, and for all
thinking people. And, it is also, I hope, a reasonably accessible
overview of the way language really works.
This book surveys discoveries from a broad array of disciplines;
these include linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neurobiology,
primatology, ethology and cognitive anthropology. And these
discoveries which have emerged since the mid-1980s have
thrown into relief long-held assumptions about the nature and
structure of language, as well as the mind, and the way we acquire
our native tongue(s). In this book, I present the emerging reality.
u
Linguistics is a relatively new discipline compared to others,

especially compared to long-established subjects such as philosophy and rhetoric, or even more recent sciences such as astronomy
and medicine. Its founding father is often taken to be the eminent
Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, whose Course in General
Linguistics (2013) was published posthumously in 1916. The
Zeitgeist for much of the second half of the twentieth century,
however, was an extreme form of rationalism, which assumed
that language is an instinct, something wholly unrelated to any
other form of non-human communication. This language myth
assumed that all human languages are governed by a single set of

Title Name: Evans
Taking stock of language
universals buried in the recesses of the human mind, with which

we are born.
The reasons for taking this sort of perspective were based on a
number of assumptions about the nature of language, in most
cases before actual detailed research had been carried out. But
today, we now know a vast amount about the diversity exhibited
by the languages of the world although acknowledging that
we still only know something about a fraction of the worlds
7,000 or so languages. We also know a vast amount about how
children acquire language, much more than we did when the
language-as-instinct thesis, as I shall call the language myth, was
formulated, originally in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, the preponderance of evidence now leads a great many linguists, myself
included, to the incontrovertible conclusion that language reects,
in important ways, more general, and generalizable, properties of
mind. And, importantly, we learn language from our parents and
caregivers, through painstaking practice and use. This, for ease,
I refer to as the language-as-use thesis. In contrast, the languageas-instinct thesis, I will seek to persuade you, is a myth; and, it is
made up of a number of component sub-myths.

Before moving on, lets get a preliminary sense of what language is
for, and how it is organised. Language is integral to our lives.
We use it to buy groceries in the supermarket, to get a job, to hire
or re an employee, to buy train tickets, and to compose an email.
We use it to make a telephone call, to irt, to invite someone
out on a date, to propose marriage, to get married, to quarrel, and
to make up afterwards. Language allows us to make friends, and
enemies, to pass the time of day, and so on. In our everyday lives,
we produce and comprehend language with such apparent ease
that we take it for granted. Yet the ease with which we use
language belies a level of complexity of immense proportions.
You might not know a preposition from an adverb, or the

Title Name: Evans
difference between the passive voice and the indicative, nor what
the double object construction is. You might also be at a loss if
I asked you how to conjugate the copula in English, or what perfective aspect is. Yet like around 400 million other native speakers
of English around the world, you and I deploy the copula and
successfully conjugate it countless times every day. In other words,
our knowledge of language is implicit rather than explicit. While
you might not be able to explain to a foreigner, should they ask,
how to conjugate the copula without the aid of a book of English
grammar, you can do it with your hands tied behind your back.
Each of us carries around in our heads a mental grammar far more
impressive than any written grammar. In short, you or I dont have
to know that the verb be is the copula to know how to use it.
Another sobering fact about spoken and indeed signed
language is this: unlike other forms of cultural behaviour, it is
blind to demographics, socioeconomics and ethnic difference.3
I, you and every other cognitively normal human being in the
world uses (or comes to use) language with the apparent ease that
we take for granted. Put another way, it doesnt matter whether
you are rich or poor, black or white or what the colour of your
eyes are. You are destined to acquire at least one language
although the majority of the worlds nearly 7 billion people grow
up speaking two or more languages. In this, the pattern of monolingualism amongst English-speaking populations is not the
norm. And, by around 4 years of age, each normally developing
human child is a linguistic genius. Nevertheless, we carry on
learning our mother tongue, throughout our lives. This is the
case not least because the language we speak changes and evolves,
often in quite short periods of time.
In virtually all of the situations in which we nd ourselves in
our daily lives, language allows quick and effective expression,
and provides a well-developed means of encoding and transmitting complex and subtle ideas. Language does this by fullling two
key functions, functions that underpin linguistic communication.
The rst is that language enables us to express our wishes,
feelings, likes, dislikes and ideas. This language achieves by encoding

Title Name: Evans
and externalising our thoughts. To do this, language uses symbols.

Symbols are meaningful bits of language. These include sub-parts
of words, such as un- and -ed in uninterested, whole words like
walk, yesterday and knickers or groups of words which form
clauses, such as behind the sofa, and groups of clauses which
form sentences, like She left her knickers behind the sofa.
The symbols that make up English, or any language, consist of
two parts, a form and a meaning. Forms may be spoken, written
or signed as in British Sign Language, the sign language of the
British deaf community while the meanings are the ideas,
or concepts, that are conventionally associated with them. For
instance, in spoken English, the word cat is made up of the three
distinct sound segments, technically known as phonemes /k/, //
and /t/ which combine to give the form /kt/. The meaning unit
conventionally paired with this form constitutes the stable knowledge that you and I have relating to cats: that they have four legs,
whiskers, a tail, make sounds of particular sorts, exhibit quirky,
cat-like behaviour of particular kinds, and so on.
However, for language to function effectively as a means of
communication, it is not enough that it employs symbols in order
to associate forms and meanings. In addition, these form-meaning
pairings must be recognised by, and accessible to, others in our
community. After all, we use language in order to get our ideas
across: to communicate. This involves a process of transmission
by the speaker, and decoding and interpretation by the hearer.
In short, language fulls a symbolic or communicative function.
But in addition, the messages we choose to encode symbolically
in language invariably perform an interactive and hence social role
the second function of language. For instance, we can use language
to change the way the world is. When a member of the clergy
makes the utterance: I now pronounce you husband and wife, in
an appropriate setting, and addressed to two consenting adults,
the utterance changes an aspect of the world in a rather special way.
From the moment the utterance has been made, the legal, social
and moral status holding between the two individuals is irrevocably
altered. The newly created husband and wife have obligations

Title Name: Evans
and potential claims towards and against each other that they
didnt have prior to the utterance of these words. In some countries,
even their tax status is altered. In short, language can be used to
perform actions which have consequences in the real world.
But one doesnt need the special status of a member of the
clergy, a Prime Minister or a sovereign to be able to alter aspects
of the world through language. An everyday expression such as
Shut that door on the way out! also represents an action performed through language in this, language bestows complete
equality: we can all do it. This expression is an attempt to have
someone do something, thereby altering an aspect of the world
to suit our own wishes or desires.
Another way in which language fulls its interactive function
is by enabling us to express our thoughts and feelings about the
world. The expressions terrorist and freedom ghter might be used
to describe the same individual by different people with different
perspectives, and different agendas. Using language to speak of a
war on terror or describing the campaign to criminalise abortion
as Pro-life is more than mere wordplay. Language carries with it
systems of ideas: words have concepts attached to them. Language
use helps to frame, or reframe particular issues, and this framing
can be both positive and negative.4 Language has been described
as a loaded weapon: it brings with it real-world consequences.5
Language also plays a role in how we affect other people, and
how we make others feel, achieved just by our choice of words.
Expressions such as Shut up! versus Im terribly sorry to interrupt
you, while ostensibly conveying the same meaning, affect our
addressee in very different ways. This is because the way in which
we present our public selves is conveyed, in large part, through
language. The nature of the language we choose to use signals
information about our attitudes towards others, ourselves and
the situations in which we nd ourselves.
Ive already intimated that a key function of language is social
interaction. For instance, we use language to engage in gossip, to
get to know someone, to conduct business, to make a purchase in
a shop, to attract members of the same or opposite sex, to declare

Title Name: Evans
undying love, and so forth. But how, exactly, do we make use

of language in order to facilitate these social functions? We do so
by engaging in culturally recognised activities in order to achieve
(what are at least usually) mutually understood goals. Moreover,
language use arises in these joint activities, which are often
extremely difcult without it.
For example, imagine going to a shoe shop in order to purchase
a pair of John Wayne cowboy boots. This involves a sales assistant
approaching you and offering help, interacting with a sales assistant in order to have your feet measured, the assistant fetching
the required cowboy boots from the stock room for you to try on,
agreeing the purchase, making payment, and the assistant boxing
or wrapping the boots. This service encounter is an example of
a culturally recognised joint activity. And, crucially, it relies on
language use in order to accomplish the desired outcome: the
purchase of the boots.
But in addition to using language during the course of a service
encounter of this kind, we have to build a mental representation
of what is going on, in order to keep track of what stage we are
at in proceedings. This involves integrating information we get
from language, with information derived from other cues, such
as seeing that the sales assistant has brought the wrong colour
boots from the store room, or that uncomfortable feeling when
the boots are too tight, as you try them on. The information which
accumulates, during joint activities of this sort, is gleaned from
our discourse our use of language and from the ongoing and
ever-changing situation(s) in which we nd ourselves.
u
Recall that I said that words consist of symbols: formmeaning

pairings. Language encompasses a wide range of different types
of knowledge which serve to support symbol use. One kind of
knowledge concerns the individual sounds that make up a particular language, and the rules that govern the way these sounds
can be combined. While there is a nite inventory of all the possible

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sounds a human being can make, different languages draw on

different numbers of these in producing the words that make up
a language. This is why a French speaker nds it difcult to
pronounce the th sound in English, and why a Chinese speaker
often cannot pronounce the r sound: fried rice becomes ied lice.
These sounds simply dont exist in French, or Mandarin. Indeed,
English speakers often sound equally absurd when speaking other
languages, as I can attest from years of mangling the French
language. A number of French sounds simply dont exist in English.
Standard English consists of twelve simple vowel sounds. These
include the /i/ in pit and the /e/ in pet. There are, in addition, a
further eight two-vowel sound sequences, known as diphthongs,
such as the /eI/ in day. English also has twenty-four consonants
like the /z/ in zip and the // in ring. This makes a total of fortyfour distinct sound segments from which all English words
are derived at least in standard British Received Pronunciation
(RP). This total, may, on the face of it be somewhat surprising,
given that the alphabet consists of only twenty-six letters. Yet
the English spelling system is, in fact, the Latin spelling system,
and as applied to English is notoriously treacherous, as is made
abundantly clear by the following poem by T. S. Watt:
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough and through.
Well done! And now you wish perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead, its said like bed, not bead
for goodness sake dont call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(they rhyme with suite and straight and debt).6
A second type of knowledge involves word structure. Each of

us intuitively knows how simple words are combined to make
complex words and the meanings associated with the parts of

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11
words involved. We know the difference between teaching, teacher

and teachable. A teacher is a person who carries out the activity of
teaching, while a subject is teachable (or not). We add the sufxes
-er, -ing and -able to the verb stem teach at will in order to derive
the requisite meaning. We also know that while a teacher is
someone who teaches, we cant necessarily add -er willy nilly
to create similar meanings. Much of our knowledge appears to
be word-specic. For instance, a villager is not someone who
villages and a bestseller is not someone who bestsells. In fact,
a bestseller is not a person at all.
Another type of knowledge relates to the range of meanings
associated with words and other linguistic expressions. Knowledge of this kind is not the restricted denitional kind that
you might nd given as concise denitions in a desk dictionary,
for instance. The sort of meanings associated with words that
you carry around in your head is better likened to an encyclopaedia. In fact, knowledge of this type is commonly referred to
as encyclopaedic knowledge. For instance, consider everything
you must know in order to understand what open means in the
following expressions: open a book, open your briefcase, open the
curtains, open your mouth and open her blouse. The kind of
knowledge you must have access to, stuffed somewhere in your
head, concerns the range of scenarios in which very different
sorts of things can be opened. After all, we apply open to very
different sorts of containers such as a briefcase, a mouth and
a blouse, with apertures of different kinds, whose opening is
achieved in different ways and for different purposes. It is less
clear that a book is a container, and it is not at all clear that
there is a container that is opened by virtue of opening curtains.
We conventionally use open in relation to these very different
scenarios, and many others, including such things as opening
a bank account. The word meanings that are stuffed into our
heads appear not to resemble the narrow, precise denitions of
a dictionary at all. Rather, they relate to the sorts of things and
situations with respect to which open can apply, the way the
opening occurs, and the purposes for the opening event.

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Consider how you would go about opening a blouse versus a

briefcase, the different sorts of entities you would be likely to nd
inside each (!), and the reasons for the opening event.
Another kind of knowledge concerns our ability to combine
words using knowledge of regular patterns in order to make a
seemingly innite number of novel sentences; we possess knowledge of the abstract rules that make up everything you and
I know about English sentence structure. Part of this involves
our knowledge regarding word order. We know, intuitively, that
in the expression The window cleaner nervously kissed the supermodel, the window cleaner did the kissing. But if we reverse the
window cleaner and the supermodel The supermodel condently
kissed the window cleaner now we have a different kisser and
kissee. Part of what you, and I, know about a language, then,
involves knowing the order in which words are positioned in a
sentence. The order, after all, determines the role we attribute
to the window cleaner and the supermodel in the kissing event.
Of course, other languages vary in quite remarkable ways.
Hungarian, for instance, has no xed word order. Each language
represents a unique system replete with its own conventions.
In addition, we possess a large inventory of idioms which are
an essential part of any language, and which often pose problems
for the language learner. For instance, try explaining to a foreign
student why, in English, we can sleep tight, soundly and deeply,
but we dont sleep wide! To bend over backwards means, somewhat bizarrely, to try very hard, rather than to bend over backwards, and to jump down someones throat means something
quite different from what it literally says. And to kick the bucket,
which means to die, changes its meaning entirely even if we
replace just one of the words. For instance, to kick the mop refers,
presumably, to a frustrated janitor rather than death.
The nal kind of knowledge that Ill touch on relates to what
we might think of as contextualisation cues. These include the
gestures which accompany our utterances, our facial expression,
and cues relating to features of stress, intonation and pitch.
For instance, whether the pitch of an utterance rises or falls can

Title Name: Evans
Myths and realities
13
determine whether we interpret the utterance to be a question

or a statement. Moreover, even a well-judged pause or glance can
provide an effective means of signalling meaning; for instance,
Marina Hyde, the journalist, writing in The Guardian, once noted
that the appeal of Alistair Campbell Tony Blairs once fearsome
spin doctor was based entirely on the look he wore a look
which said: Id like to shag you, if only I had the time.7
Myths and realities

In this book I present a number of myths, associated with the
language-as-instinct thesis. I contrast these with what I suggest are
the more plausible realities, given current knowledge. These realities suggest a wholly different thesis: language-as-use. Beginning
with Chapter 2, each chapter commences with a succinct statement of the myth, and then presents the reasons for thinking
that the reality lies away from the position maintained by it.
The focus, then, is on debunking the myths, in part by presenting
the evidence which supports the realities. And in so doing, I aim
to show what contemporary research reveals about the nature of
language, its function and organisation: how language is learned,
and the way it reects fundamental aspects of the human mind.
In view of this, a reasonable question to ask is: what exactly
do I mean by a myth? And, equally, what do I mean by a reality?
A myth, for my purposes, is an unproven account of a linguistic
phenomenon that appears to be at odds with actual ndings
relating to language, the mind, and so on. The myth may derive
from a best-guess attempt to account for an observed phenomenon.
Moreover, what makes something a myth is that it relates to a
speculative approach to understanding language. For instance, the
basis for the language-as-instinct thesis derives from the proposals
made by the famous (or perhaps infamous) American researcher
Noam Chomsky, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. Chomsky
made a number of observations about the nature of language, and
speculated that as language emerges apparently effortlessly, and

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all humans appear to be capable of acquiring language, then there

must be an innately specied Universal Grammar that allows
language to grow in the minds of humans, but no other species:
language is an instinct.
But some readers may be surprised to learn that the language-asinstinct thesis is not based on actual ndings. Nor is it based
on detailed observations about how children appear to acquire
language. Even today, over fty years after it was rst proposed,
there is a paucity of cross-linguistic studies that have been conducted
by Chomsky and his colleagues aiming to substantiate the claims
of the language-as-instinct thesis. Chomskys arguments were largely
logical in nature, and to him (and his followers) self-evident: evidence was not required. And myths do have a tendency of becoming
immune to evidence thats what a myth is: plausible, institutionalised through ritual retelling, and the worst possible nightmare for
truth. But putting Chomskys cult-status aside, progress in any eld
of science requires hard evidence, rather than the word of a great
man. Good theories, ultimately, ensure that reality bites, in the form
of evidence for or against. And a good theory should, at least
in principle, have a way of being proved wrong.8 As the scientic
ndings have accrued, these increasingly make it very hard indeed
to maintain the language-as-instinct thesis, as I hope to show you.
A reality, in contrast, consists of an account following detailed
observations, data collection and analysis relating to the linguistic
phenomenon. In other words, the realities I describe in this book
follow from ndings of fact, and analyses based on them, rather
than being due to speculative arm-chair theorising.
My presentation of myths and realities focuses on some of
the burning questions in the study of language and mind. These
include the following.
Is human language unrelated to animal
communication systems?
The myth maintains that language is the preserve of humans, and
humans alone; it cannot be compared to anything found amongst

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Myths and realities
15
non-humans, and is unrelated to any non-human communicative capability. And the myth reinforces a view that there is
an immense divide that separates human language from the
communicative systems of other species. And more generally,
it separates humans from all other species. But recent ndings
on the way other species communicate, from apes to whales,
from vervets to starlings, increasingly suggest that such a view
may overstate the divide that separates human language and
non-human communicative systems. Indeed, many of the
characteristics exhibited by human language are found, to varying degrees, across a broad spectrum of animal communication
systems. In point of fact, we can learn more about human
language, and what makes it special, by seeking to understand
how it relates to and is derived from the communication systems
of other species. This suggests that, although human language
is qualitatively different, it is related to other non-human communication systems.
Are there language universals?
The language-as-instinct thesis claims that human babies enter
the world pre-equipped to learn language. Language emerges
effortlessly and automatically. And this is because we are all
born with a Universal Grammar: a pre-specied listing of language universals a universal being a feature of grammar that
is shared by all languages. Moreover, as all languages are
assumed to derive from this Universal Grammar, the study of
a single language can reveal its design. In other words, despite
having different sound systems and vocabularies, all languages
are basically like English. Hence, we dont in fact need to
learn or study any of the exotic languages out there we need
only focus on English, which contains the answers to how all
other languages work. But, like the myth that language is unrelated to animal forms of communication, the myth of language
universals is contradicted by the evidence. I argue that language emerges and diversies, in and during specic instances

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16
of language use. Once Ive reviewed some of the evidence for

linguistic diversity, evidence that is incompatible with the
language-as-instinct worldview, I present some of the usage-based
pressures that collectively conspire to give rise to linguistic
diversity.
Is language innate?
No one disputes that human children come into the world
biologically prepared for language from speech production
apparatus, to information processing capacity, to memory storage, we are neurobiologically equipped to acquire spoken or
signed language in a way no other species is. But the issue under
the microscope is this: the language-as-instinct thesis proposes
that a special kind of knowledge grammatical knowledge
must be present at birth. Linguistic knowledge a Universal
Grammar that all humans are born with is hard-wired into
the microcircuitry of the human brain. The view that language
is innate is, in a number of respects, highly attractive at a
stroke, it solves the problem of trying to account for how
children acquire language without receiving negative feedback,
from their parents and caregivers, when they make mistakes
it has been widely reported that parents, for the most part,
dont systematically correct errors children make as they acquire
language. And children can and do acquire their mother tongue
without correction of any sort.9 Moreover, children have
acquired spoken language before they begin formal schooling:
children are not taught spoken language, they just acquire it,
seemingly automatically. But such a strong view eliminates
the need for learning apart from the relatively trivial task of
learning the words of whatever language it is we end up speaking.
The essentials of language, common to all languages, are present
in our brains prior to birth, so the language myth contends. But
we now know that these specic assumptions are incorrect,
as I shall show.

Title Name: Evans
Myths and realities
17
Is language a distinct module in the mind?

In western thought there has been a venerable tradition in which
the mind has been conceived in terms of distinct faculties. With
the advent of cognitive science in the 1950s, the digital computer
became the analogy of choice for the human mind. While the idea
that the mind is a computer has been a central and highly inuential
heuristic in cognitive science, the radical proposal that the mind,
like the computer, is also modular was made by philosopher of
mind Jerry Fodor. In a now classic book, Modularity of Mind,
published in 1983, whose reverberations are felt to this day, Fodor
proposed that language is the paradigm example of a mental
module. And this view, from the language-as-instinct perspective,
makes perfect sense. According to Fodor, a mental module is
realised in dedicated neural architecture. It copes with a specic
and restricted type of information, and is impervious to the workings of other modules. As a consequence, a module can be selectively
impaired, resulting in the breakdown in the behaviour associated
with the module. And as a module deals with a specic type
of information, the module will emerge at the particular point
during the life cycle when it is needed. Hence, a mental module, in
developmental terms, follows a characteristic schedule. The notion
that the mind is modular might, on the face of it, make intuitive
sense. In our everyday lives we associate component parts of artefacts with specic functions. The principle of modularity of design
is both a practical and sensible approach to the manufacture not
just of computers but of many, many aspects of everyday commodities, from cars to childrens toys. However, the evidence, as will
become clear, provides very little grounds for thinking that language
is a module of mind, or indeed that the mind is modular.
Is there a universal Mentalese?

The language myth contends that meaning in natural languages,
such as English or Japanese, derives, ultimately, from a universal

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Title Name: Evans
language of thought: Mentalese. Mentalese is the minds internal

or private language, and makes thought possible. It is universal in
the sense that all humans are born with it. It is language-like,
consisting of symbols, which can be combined by rules of mental
syntax. Without Mentalese we could not learn the meanings
of words in any given language spoken or signed. But as
I shall show, Mentalese assumes a view of mind that is wrongheaded: it assumes that human minds are computer-like. It also
suffers from a number of other difculties, which make this
supposition deeply problematic.
Is thought independent of language?
While everyone accepts that language affects thought in the
sense that we use language to argue, persuade, convince and so
on, according to the language myth, thought is, in principle,
independent. The idea that systematic patterns in grammatical
and semantic representations across languages (a.k.a. linguistic
relativity) give rise to corresponding differences in patterns of
thought across communities is utterly wrong. As we shall see,
the language-as-instinct theorists mischaracterise the thesis of
linguistic relativity. Moreover, there is also now a signicant
amount of scientic evidence suggesting that, in point of fact,
the linguistic patterning of our native tongue(s) does indeed
have indelible and habitual consequences for how we perceive
the world.
u
From this brief overview of the issues, one salient theme that
emerges is, surely, the following. Language and rational thought
so the language-as-instinct myth contends are too complex and
arguably too mysterious to be accounted for without appeal to
special knowledge. Such knowledge is special in the sense that we
simply dont know where it comes from. Experience, and general
learning mechanisms, cant account for these unique features of

Title Name: Evans
A straw man?
19
the human mind. Thus, language must be hard-wired, part of

our genetic endowment: enter Universal Grammar.
Richard Dawkins describes this type of explanation as an argument from incredulity,10 while Daniel Everett notes that it
boils down, essentially, to a lack of imagination.11 It proceeds as
follows: we ( the extremely clever, tenured professors) cant
see how children could possibly learn something as complex as
grammar which underpins language. Therefore, they cant learn it.
Thus, grammar must be innate.
The cognitive scientist Anthony Chemero12 has described
such a move as a Hegelian argument after the widely ridiculed
proof of Hegel. In 1801, Hegel claimed that the number of
planets in the solar system was seven, based on premises which
he provided, and had no evidence for. Indeed, we now know that
there are eight major planets, and ve dwarf planets, including
Pluto. The language-as-instinct thesis is precisely this: a Hegelian
argument.
But, speculation aside, we know, today, a vast amount about
how language is learned, how languages differ, how concepts
are formed, and how language interfaces with conceptual knowledge. While we certainly dont know everything there is to
know, or even a fraction of everything, at this juncture we are in
a position to do far better than the language-as-instinct thesis. In
the pages that follow, I will present the case for a nearer approximation to the reality: the language-as-use thesis.
A straw man?
One of the objections, I anticipate, to this book is that I am
attacking a straw man. Surely the myths described above are
not taken seriously? Indeed, one colleague has rmly censured
me with the following reprimand: These myths are extreme
views that barely anyone subscribes to.
Alas, this is not the case. The views that I classify as myths are
presented as established fact in many of the linguistics textbooks

20
Title Name: Evans
currently in use in many of the stellar universities throughout

the English-speaking world. I was trained using these textbooks,
and they are still compulsory reading for todays undergraduate
and graduate students tomorrows researchers, educators and
language professionals even at the university where I teach and
work. University students are regularly told that there is a
Universal Grammar, that language is innate, that language is
incommensurable with non-human communication systems,
and that all languages are essentially English-like.
For instance, the worlds best-selling university textbook on
language is An Introduction to Language, written by Professor
Victoria Fromkin and colleagues. This book, now in its tenth
revised edition, proclaims the following in its very rst chapter:
This business is just what the linguist attempts to nd out the
laws of a language, and the laws of all languages. Those laws
that pertain to all human languages, representing the universal
properties of language, constitute a Universal Grammar . . . To
discover the nature of this Universal Grammar whose principles
characterize all human languages is a major aim of linguistic
theory. . .the more we investigate this question, the more evidence
accumulates to support Chomskys view that there is a universal
grammar that is part of the human biologically endowed language
faculty.13
A recently published textbook introduction to the English language, The Structure of Modern English, by Professor Laurel
Brinton, makes the following claims in its introductory chapter:
Language is rule-governed, creative, universal, innate and learned,
all at the same time . . . A more general set of constraints on
language is known as language universals. These are features of
language that are not language specic . . . Inherent in the notion
of universals is the belief that language is innate, that we are
born with an inborn capacity for language acquisition.14
As we shall see, the claims made in both these representative

textbooks are wrong they y in the face of, now, several decades
of evidence-based research.

A straw man?
Title Name: Evans
21
More worrying, the educated general public has been treated to

a series of best-selling popular books on language by Professor
Steven Pinker of Harvard University, no less. Pinker is talented,
eloquent and erudite. He presents various views of language
and mind adopting the language-as-instinct thesis that he has
helped to develop. The educated general public who have read
such pop-sci. bestsellers, including The Language Instinct (1994),
Words and Rules (2001), How the Mind Works (1997), The Blank
Slate (2002) and The Stuff of Thought (2007), might be forgiven,
given Pinkers eloquence, for thinking that Pinker is right, and
everything is settled. Far from it: dont be fooled! As we shall see,
the language-as-instinct crowd dont always ght fair: ideas can
be massaged to t the claims, and often, too often, the facts are
misrepresented, ridiculed or simply not presented at all. Moreover, since Pinkers rst popular book appeared, back in 1994,
science has moved on. And to end it all, Pinker is largely wrong,
about language and about a number of other things too as we
shall see.
So here it is: I will be arguing that there is no Universal
Grammar, and language is not innate: at least, not in the way
supposed. More than that, the current generation of university
students is still being systematically presented, at the very least,
with controversial claims for which there is scant empirical
evidence. And the general public deserve a proper exposure to
the full facts, and the state of the art. This all matters because
language is central to such a vast array of disciplines throughout
the humanities as well as the cognitive and behavioural sciences.
More than that, language is central to virtually everything we do:
it is the measure of our lives. And, if for no other reason than that,
it deserves to be correctly understood and appreciated.
Ive written this book precisely because the myths I shall be
refuting do not add up to a straw man. The language myth
described and debunked in this book is very much alive. The
component myths that make it up that I tackle in each of the
chapters to follow relate to versions of the brand of speculative
linguistics argued for by the linguist Noam Chomsky, and

22
Title Name: Evans
speculative psychology developed by his collaborator, the philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor about whom well hear later.
These myths are now widely believed to constitute established
fact. More worryingly, these views are sanctioned by widely
adopted textbooks. This all amounts to an object lesson in how
retellings of a particular story, however erroneous, can become
widely disseminated as established fact. The language-as-instinct
thesis is plausible. But plausibility does not amount to reality.
The language-as-instinct thesis is a Hegelian argument, without
empirical basis, and, worse, a myth. And as J. F. Kennedy once
observed, a myth persistent, persuasive and unrealistic poses the
greatest harm to the quest for truth.
Lessons from evolution

In the mediaeval Great Chain of Being all life and matter was
conceptualised as forming a hierarchy. In the Renaissance worldview, God sat at the pinnacle, with angels located below. Then
came humans, followed by animals, vegetation and nally inanimate matter.
This view of existence was radically challenged in the nineteenth century by Darwins dangerous idea: humans evolved
from the Great Apes. The evolutionary picture Darwin presented
did more than offend the Creationist myth provided by Christian dogma. It challenged a fundamental presumption that all
sensible people held: humans are qualitatively different from all
other animals. In fact, humans are so much more than animals
that they are not animals at all or so we often assume, even
today. After all, the derogatory use of the term animal relates to
a crazed beast, devoid of reason, and driven by blind emotion
and bodily function. The story of evolution is dangerous not
because it is an affront to the power of God, and even his very
existence although it is from the Creationist perspective but
because it challenges our own presumptions about our place
in the world; it challenges our fundamental beliefs about our

Title Name: Evans
23
relation to the cats, dogs and horses we call pets and use to serve
us in our everyday lives.
Today we know that our species, Homo sapiens (wise man),
shared a common ancestor with modern chimpanzees and bonobos sometime around 6 million years ago. And all three species
shared a common ancestor with gorillas and orang-utans around
15 million years ago. Anatomically modern humans humans
that look, more or less, like you and me are only around 170,000
years old, give or take 30,000 years, the dating margin of error.
We know this from carbon dating of fossils, and from genetic
dating of mitochondrial DNA found in female humans.15 And the
evidence for evolution shows that the changes that paved the
way for modern humans were gradual, and continuous.16 We
didnt evolve from Homo erectus (upright man) overnight Homo
erectus was one of the earliest species of the genus Homo. Around
1.8 million years of gradual change intervened.
That said, the nature of language, and its status as being
unique, are emotive issues, especially for linguists. After all,
professional linguists scholars like me who study language(s)
for a living have gathered a vast amount of information about
language. We know far more than any previous generation about
how it works: its internal structure, the relation between form and
meaning, how it is processed by the brain, and the socio-cultural
status of the words and phrases we produce. For many professional linguists, language is unique a priori. And indeed, human
language provides a richness that seemingly is not apparent anywhere else. As Bertrand Russell has pithily put it: No matter how
eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents
were poor but honest. And as George Carlin has joked: Meow
means woof in cat. The point, of course, is that cats just have
meow, and dogs woof and these vocalisations must serve all
the possible mental states the lowly dog or cat seeks to express.
Humans, in contrast, can combine vast numbers of words,
forming sentences of incredible grammatical complexity. And
this enables us to talk about almost anything we choose, from
the consequences of ination for the national economy to the

24
Title Name: Evans
(decidedly odd) dress sense of Superman, who wears his underpants on the outside.
But the danger with emphasising the uniqueness of language
is that it can seem to overstate the gap between human language
and other forms of communication, such as animal systems of
communication an issue I shall address in the next chapter.
After all, if language is unlike anything else, it is then but a small
step and a slippery slope to claiming that language really must
have emerged out of thin air. The language-as-instinct thesis
proposes something very much like this. Its progenitor and most
extreme proponent, Noam Chomsky, has claimed that language
was most likely the result of a genetic mutation. On this account,
language emerged all at once in a perfect or near-perfect state,
in one lucky individual, who won the greatest linguistic jackpot
of all time.17
But this account has been criticised by a wide range of scholars
on evolutionary grounds. For instance, one prominent expert,
the biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon, has described it
as a hopeful monster story, after evolutionarily implausible and
widely ridiculed claims made by the German geneticist Richard
Goldenschmidt in the 1940s. A hopeful monster account of evolution proposes that evolution may involve a sudden very large
change from one generation to the next, facilitating the emergence
of a new feature.18 According to Deacon, Chomsky explains
away the origin-of-language problem by sleight of hand: like a
white rabbit, it is pulled from out of evolutions magic hat. And
consequently, this hopeful monster explanation the languageas-instinct thesis is completely at odds with the facts of evolution. Language, as we know it today, must have required many
changes to the cognitive (re-)organisation, as well as the anatomy,
of pre-linguistic hominins, in order to achieve its current level of
sophistication. These would have both affected the primate brain
plan inherited by ancestral humans, and changed the anatomy
of the genus Homo. Moreover, the result would have facilitated
an anatomy enabling the production of speech in Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal man) now extinct, but who probably

Title Name: Evans
25
had some form of speech capability as well as Homo Heidelbergensis, the common ancestor of both humans and Neanderthals.19
Such changes, at the very, very least, would have necessitated
quantitative variations in the pre-human brain such as an expansion of the frontal part of the cortex the outer layer of the human
brain relative to other regions. Greater direct control by the
cortex over the mouth would also have been required, not least to
produce the articulatory gestures to facilitate speech: speech is
one of the most complex neuromuscular activities we accomplish,
involving around an incredible seventy-eight distinct muscles.20
A further change has been the lowering of the larynx (or voice
box), compared even to our forebears, which has taken evolutionary time to accomplish. As I explain in the next chapter, this was
required in order to facilitate speech production, but at the risk
of death by choking an unfortunate side effect of being able to
talk. In the United Kingdom around 16,000 people are treated in
hospitals each year for choking. And status is no barrier: US
President George W. Bush hit the headlines in 2002 when he
fainted for a few seconds and fell off a couch after choking on a
pretzel. Other changes would have been required, such as an
expansion of working-memory, required for composing and producing utterances. Increased memory would have been required for
developing temporal sequencing skills, essential for human syntax
the ability to produce grammatically well-formed sentences.
In contrast, chimpanzees, for instance, only have a workingmemory capability equivalent to that of a two-year-old human
infant.21 But a sophisticated working-memory is essential for
human-like grammar, which requires recalling and sequencing
strings of words in the correct order. In short, even if an ancestral
human being had, by some chance mutation, developed a
language gene, without a language-ready brain and body, the gene
would have been useless.
Just as language had to be presaged by many other changes
to the ancestral human genome, occurring gradually and incrementally, it is likely that language itself emerged gradually. Just as
evolution teaches us that changes build upon one another

26
Title Name: Evans
incrementally, another lesson relates to the principle of evolutionary natural drift.22

Evolution as natural drift nuances the classic Darwinian formulation that evolution involves, more or less, progressive tness.
Evolution as natural drift presumes a co-determining relationship
between organism and environment. An organism evolves in
order to best obtain advantage from regularities in its environment. From this perspective, evolution involves co-evolution. For
instance, honeybees see in the ultraviolet range of the colour
spectrum. Flowers have co-evolved with honeybees so that those
most likely to be pollinated are the species which provide greatest
ultraviolet reectance.
As ancestral humans were anatomically incapable of speech, it is
highly plausible that proto-language emerged via other means.
And this involved co-evolution of neuroanatomical changes ultimately resulting in spoken language.23 A likely suspect is gesture,
and as we shall see in the next chapter, chimpanzees and other
primates make ready use of gestures for purposes of communication.24 We thus gain insight into human language by looking for
similarities with (and differences from) other forms of animal
communication. To paraphrase the metaphysical poet John Donne,
no species is an island. And language did not emerge out of thin air.
It is grounded in the communicative tendencies apparent in our
ancestral forebears.25 And various forms of proto-language abound,
to varying degrees, in many other extant species.
All that said, human language does, nevertheless, achieve the
level of sophistication absent elsewhere. And this is because
humans have evolved a special kind of intelligence cultural
intelligence that harnesses the communicative abilities that are
apparent elsewhere, about which I shall have more to say later,
especially in the nal chapter when I fully review the new synthesis: the language-as-use thesis. Nevertheless, this sceptred kind
of intelligence facilitates a range of cooperative behaviours of
which language is an example par excellence. This is the issue
to which we now turn.

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Comp. by: Pradeep Stage: Proof Chapter No.

Title Name: Evans

Language and mind rethought

This is a book about language, and about its relationship with

Comp. by: Pradeep Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 1

Title Name: Evans

language and mind rethought

Comp. by: Pradeep Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 1

Title Name: Evans

Language and mind rethought

Comp. by: Pradeep Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 1

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language and mind rethought

than the paradigm example of cultural behaviour, one that sets us

Linguistics is a relatively new discipline compared to others,

Comp. by: Pradeep Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 1

Title Name: Evans

Taking stock of language

universals buried in the recesses of the human mind, with which

Taking stock of language

Comp. by: Pradeep Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 1

Title Name: Evans

language and mind rethought

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Taking stock of language

and externalising our thoughts. To do this, language uses symbols.

Comp. by: Pradeep Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 1

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language and mind rethought

Comp. by: Pradeep Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 1

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Taking stock of language

undying love, and so forth. But how, exactly, do we make use

Recall that I said that words consist of symbols: formmeaning

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language and mind rethought

sounds a human being can make, different languages draw on

A second type of knowledge involves word structure. Each of

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Taking stock of language

words involved. We know the difference between teaching, teacher

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language and mind rethought

Consider how you would go about opening a blouse versus a

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Myths and realities

determine whether we interpret the utterance to be a question

Myths and realities

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language and mind rethought

all humans appear to be capable of acquiring language, then there

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Title Name: Evans