This is probably why, in my experience, innateness issues of any kind also don’t play a role in the everyday practice of most linguists.
The people who study the issue of natural languages being somehow interestingly constrained by biology are, incidentally, not normal linguists, but they’re mixture of computer scientists, mathematical linguists, and psychologists, who look at the formal properties of natural language grammars and their learnability properties. And if there are such constraints, there is of course the further question of whether we’re dealing with something that is specific to language, or a general cognitive principle.
Being a much more ordinary linguist, I don’t even know what the state of that field is. So basically, I don’t really get what all the fuss is about.
A more significant divide in linguists seems to me to be between the people who do formally well-defined stuff and those who don’t. Ironically, a lot of Chomskyans fall into the latter category.
Also, there’s much more impressive developmental evidence for certain kinds of things being innate than language acquisition.
This is probably why, in my experience, innateness issues of any kind also don’t play a role in the everyday practice of most linguists.
The people who study the issue of natural languages being somehow interestingly constrained by biology are, incidentally, not normal linguists, but they’re mixture of computer scientists, mathematical linguists, and psychologists, who look at the formal properties of natural language grammars and their learnability properties. And if there are such constraints, there is of course the further question of whether we’re dealing with something that is specific to language, or a general cognitive principle.
Being a much more ordinary linguist, I don’t even know what the state of that field is. So basically, I don’t really get what all the fuss is about.
A more significant divide in linguists seems to me to be between the people who do formally well-defined stuff and those who don’t. Ironically, a lot of Chomskyans fall into the latter category.
Also, there’s much more impressive developmental evidence for certain kinds of things being innate than language acquisition.