Reading Greenhill’s replies is also entertaining, in a pretty depressing way. Basically, “yup, you’re right, so what?”

Imagine Nature publishing a paper in chemistry or neuroscience with citations like that. Imagine them tolerating such a thing.

Ps – BTW, against Cinque’s theory, see Dryer’s “On the order of demonstrative, numeral, adjective, and noun: an alternative to Cinque” 2009. Ms.

” This is an article:

1. whose data are bad,
2. whose analysis is dodgy,
3. whose grip on relevant literature is weak, and
3. whose conclusions are non-sequiturs.

Those details aside, it’s a good paper.”

But there are explicit,exact proposals about subdomains of UG: for example, Cinque’s theory (modified in a subsequent paper by the linguists Abels and Neeleman) of Greenberg’s “Universal 20″, which governs the order of adjectives, determiners (e.g. “the”, “a”, “this”), numerals and the noun in Noun Phrases across languages of every family. Googling for “universal 20″ and one of the names mentioned above will get you to those papers.

If you want a less technical book for non-specialists that tells you something about what has been discovered about language variation more generally, I recommend Mark Baker’s “Atoms of Language”. If you’re looking for someone’s explicit, exact computer program that models this kind of system across a broader domain, look at the work of Sandiway Fong among others. For an explicit model of the acquisition process in this vein, Charles Yang’s research is a good place to start.

P

(1) The Dunn et al article in Nature is not about language evolution (in the Darwinian sense); it is about language history.

(2) Universal grammar (UG) is a complex set of rules, discovered by Chomsky and his co-workers. UG turns out to be universal (i.e., all known language are governed by its rules) and its rules turn out to be unlearnable on the basis of what the child says and hears, so they must be inborn in the human brain and genome.

(3) Although UG itself is universal, it has some free parameters that are set by learning. Word-order (subject-object vs. object-subject) is one of those learned parameters. The parameter-settings themselves differ for different language families, and are hence, of course, not universal, but cultural.

(4) Hence the Dunn et al results on the history of word-order are not, as claimed, refutations of UG.

Harnad, S. (2008) Why and How the Problem of the Evolution of Universal Grammar (UG) is Hard. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31: 524-525 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/15618/

I think this study is attempting to falsify the existence of universal parameters. But Chomsky’s principles and parameters theory argues for *parametric variation*, which the study finds. Ergo this study is not falsifying anything Chomskian.

Also, reading the authors’ quotations, they seem to be on a mission to explain surface (not abstract) linguistic variation as “cultural”. But what is “cultural”? It means nothing. They also dismiss Pinkerian modularity of mind and suggest the mind is “far more complex” the modularity hypothesis assumes. How exactly? They do not explain.

A welcome study but I’m not impressed.

There *is* no “Chomskyan idea that rules associate in certain sets”, especially where the rules in question concern WORD order (rather than the more abstract structural relations that Chomsky and his colleagues do concern themselves with).

The study in Nature has literally nothing at all to do with anything Chomsky has argued for.

Now this article may be interesting for other reasons — see Mark Liberman’s thoughtful discussion today in Language Log, for example. But the anti-Chomsky spin placed on the article is just nuts (though it’s a good way to get publicity for a study on language). The results have logically nothing to do with Chomsky or with Universal grammar. As a linguist, I cringe at this sort of nonsense — especially since it seems to come around every year or so (Google “Piraha”, for example).