United Spectrum: The Unity of Nature and the Division of Man

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United Spectrum : The Unity of Nature and the Division of Man by Levi Morris (2011, Paperback)

Increasing knowledge has revealed occasional exceptions to features that Hockett viewed as absolute universals, rendering them highly probably statistical generalizations rather than strictly present in every language. Languages use a limited set of meaningless items phonemes to build up a much larger set of meaningful words, and then, at a second level, recombine these words into sentences that also have meaning.

Research on a recently developed Bedouin sign language suggests that this language, alone in the world, lacks such duality of patterning [ 8 ]. But this single exception does not invalidate the regularity. Instead, it suggests that a new language must exist for more than a few generations before it develops duality during glossogeny.

Furthermore, this exception offers the exciting possibility of observing and studying the emergence of a language universal, of catching glossogeny in the act of generating a design principle of language. In summary, from its beginnings, the modern linguistic quest for language universals has sought probabilistic regularities that are abstract and implicational rather than universally present.

The authors assembled by Greenberg [ 12 ] also saw the statement of universals as a first step in discovering the principles of language acquisition, psycholinguistics or sociology that create such static patterns, and sought to understand both regularities and the processes that generate them. Finally, they recognized that the discovery of language universals, in this extended sense of abstract cross-linguistic generalizations, particularly in comparison with communication systems in other animals, must play an important role in a biological understanding of human language.

At roughly the same time, a revolution was occurring in linguistics, with the introduction of generative linguistics by Noam Chomsky and his colleagues cf. Chomsky broke with the previous structuralist tradition in several ways, but the most relevant here is that he emphasized the complexity of syntax, and thus the seemingly miraculous fact that every child implicitly does what generations of linguists have so far failed to achieve explicitly: Chomsky's new interpretation of the term universal grammar henceforth abbreviated UG thus placed the creative, productive aspect of language at centre stage.

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Chomsky extended the abstraction of the term universal even further than Greenberg and colleagues, recognizing two further categories of abstract universal. Substantive universals are regularities at a relatively superficial descriptive level. Chomsky also highlighted a second more abstract type of universal. In syntax, for example, a core idea of generative grammar is that phrases and sentences have a tree-like structure: An example of a formal universal would be that syntactic rules apply to such trees rather than, say, serial word order and thus that syntactic rules need to be stated in structural rather than serial terms.

Note that there is no restriction in these examples to syntax, nor stipulation that such formal universals are somehow encapsulated to language: Thus, despite a possible connotation that universal grammar is specific to syntax, or to language more broadly, Chomsky specifically denied any strict separation of language and other aspects of the human mind in his re-introduction of this term. The notion that UG concerns only syntax is probably the most pernicious of a number of common misinterpretations of UG; see ch.

UG is thus nothing more or less than an abstract characterization of the human language faculty FLB —the instinct to learn language—including all of its mechanisms and their interactions. It is unsurprising that the last 40 years have seen considerable debate concerning its nature: Thus, many researchers united in their search for the innate basis of the FLB have offered diverse approaches to linguistic theory, representing different theoretical gambits concerning the contents and nature of this faculty.

Most other universal features of language acquisition would then result from other aspects of the human mind cognitive, perceptual or motor skills , or from the interactions of these cognitive mechanisms with this minimal syntactic core. In contrast, more elaborate models of UG posit an extensive suite of human- and language-specific mechanisms, running the gamut from speech perceptual and vocal tract adaptations to high-level syntactic structures [ 14 , 50 , 52 ].

Finally, some approaches to linguistics suggest that essentially nothing in the FLB is specific to language see the collection in Tomasello [ 57 ]. Although proponents of such approaches often strongly reject the term universal grammar e. As emphasized in the useful overview of Jackendoff [ 50 ], such diversity of opinion is to be expected, and is a healthy sign of science at work.

When scientists reach broad agreement about the nature of the FLB, the constraints that our innate endowment places on human languages and the manner in which this endowment aids the child in language acquisition, we will have solved some of the most fundamental problems in human biology.

It would be naive to expect such a holy grail to yield quickly or easily to scientific research. These are not intended to be either exhaustive or necessarily self-consistent, but rather to provide a sense of the kinds of features and issues that are currently being debated. Many of these universals have at least one language that appears to be an exception cf. It can hardly be doubted that this debate will continue for many more years. In summary, the search for linguistic universals has proceeded from the eighteenth-century assumption of a rather superficial list of features common to languages every language has words, every language has nouns and verbs to a far more abstract set of generalizations and regularities about the human language faculty , and the biological endowment that a human child uses to acquire language [ 41 , 42 ].

These regularities will certainly incorporate more general aspects of cognition, including aspects of perception, motor control or conceptual structure that predated language in human evolutionary history. From this abstract perspective, UG is not reducible to a list of properties universally found in every language, nor does its existence imply such a list.

As Jackendoff [ 50 ] puts it, UG is a characterization of the toolkit the child uses in language acquisition, not a list of universal features of adult languages. It is quite unfortunate, then, that many critics have conflated UG and surface language universals, and proffered the discovery of exceptions to some broad regularity as a refutation of UG e. The notion of UG is perfectly compatible with a very broad range of linguistic diversity, evolving via cultural processes, and indeed has developed over many decades with precisely this diversity in mind.

Within the broadly defined and still incomplete set of commonalities and regularities discussed above, the diversity of existing human languages is quite astounding cf. The closest non-human analogue to this culturally transmitted diversity comes from the song systems of some songbirds e. Diversity itself is an important aspect of the biology of language, clearly tied to the learned, culturally transmitted aspects of human language [ 28 ]. Within these broad constraints, virtually every aspect of human language is variable. A fundamental difference is modality , which varies between spoken languages and over signed languages, expressed via manual and facial movements.

Although many animal communication systems contain both visual and auditory components, there is no non-human system in which one modality can be completely replaced by another and yet convey identical messages [ 69 ]. In the domain of sound systems, all spoken languages include consonants and vowels, but there is huge variation in the number of phonemes, from 11 to roughly [ 13 , 70 ]. Among vowels, many of the world's languages have only three vowels, and the mean number is five [ 71 , 72 ], making the English vowel system rather rich with its 15 or so vowels despite our writing system making do with six.

Consonants are even more variable in number and type [ 73 ]. Nonetheless, the diversity of human vowel systems is underlain by well-understood regularities. Vowel systems provide an excellent model system for understanding the interactions between cultural transmission, communicative efficiency and universality. Across many languages, the distribution of vowels in formant space changes systematically as vowel number increases.

This pattern can be duplicated by a simple mathematical model of energy-optimized intelligibility [ 74 ]. Computer simulations that explicitly model glossogeny converge on a set of vowel patterns quite similar to those observed in real languages [ 75 — 77 ], suggesting that cultural transmission plays a central role, though always within biologically imposed limits. These universal regularities in vowel systems can be understood as resulting from an interaction between biologically given aspects of human audition and vocal production the ear and vocal tract with constraints of communication, intelligibility and ease of production, and optimized over many generations.

Vowel systems are thus one of several abstract universals that derive from an interaction of biologically given and glossogenetic forces; they illustrate the futility of attempts to assign such aspects of language to one or the other of these categories. Words and their internal morphological structure are one of the most variable aspects of language. At the level of semantics, languages obviously vary considerably in words involving technology: For spatial vocabulary, some languages use absolute references rather than locally defined spatial terms to denote location: Finally, at a pragmatic level, there can be huge variation within a single language in terms of the words, syntax and even phonetics used by men and women, or language used between social equals versus between dominant and subordinate individuals.

This fact led many of the early American linguists engaged in documenting Native American languages to believe in essentially unconstrained variation. Nonetheless, for all of the examples above, linguists have uncovered regularities revealing constraints on the form of possible human languages. We now turn to the mechanisms underlying these regularities. A tension between diversity and universality is a long-running theme in biology. A similar distinction can be made among students of language. It is essentially a matter of taste whether one emphasizes the twigs or the main branches; both are important and both need to be recognized and studied.

These observations are as true of glossogeny, the cultural evolution process that generates languages, as for biological evolution, and indeed many of the same tools can thus be fruitfully used to analyse them [ 25 , 86 , 87 ]. An analogy to the diversity and unity of languages is provided by features of our own vast phylum, the vertebrates. Universal vertebrate features are encompassed in the notion of a Bauplan: To this are attached ribs and generally appendages.

A mouth at the front of the animal serves for both food and respiration, and is followed by branchial arches forming jaws, gills or other diverse structures. Many other shared traits also characterize most vertebrates, but these few suffice to make the point: So, for example, snakes have lost their limbs and sharks and rays have lost their bony skeleton [ 88 ]. Thus, when scholars cite unusual languages as a refutation of the entire concept of UG e.

Much of the current debate within linguistics concerning universals centres not on whether some regularities, suitably abstract or statistical, exist. All commentators agree the answer is yes, perhaps with occasional exceptions.

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The arguments concern whether these result from cultural or biological factors, and if biological whether the underlying mechanisms are specific to language or result from some more general cognitive constraints e. I suggest that from a biological viewpoint this distinction is unproductive and misleading, and that the debates surrounding it have led cognitive science down a blind alley. This is not, of course, because the study of such neural and genetic mechanisms, or the developmental, cultural and evolutionary processes that generate them, is vague or meaningless—quite the contrary.

Development involves cycles of causation, where variables that are initially effects later act back upon their previous causes. Development involves a cascade of such cyclically causal complexes, allowing initially simple systems to differentiate and increase in complexity. To illustrate, consider a few well-defined mechanisms involved in spoken language. First, the capacity for vocal imitation, unique to humans among primates, appears to rest on the existence of direct connections between lateral motor cortex and the motor neurons serving the larynx, tongue and respiratory muscles reviewed in [ 90 ].

Such connections exist in humans and not other primates [ 91 ], but comparable connections also exist in vocally imitating birds [ 92 , 93 ]. The capacity for vocal imitation, and thus this neural mechanism, is a central requirement for culturally shared spoken language. Not necessarily—increased vocal control and imitation of vocalization also plays a central and necessary role in human song [ 94 ].

While some scholars have argued that song, or music in general, is non-adaptive, unselected by-products of language e. In any case, the mechanism is both shared with song, and with other species, and is squarely part of FLB.

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A genetic example is provided by the FOXP2 gene, which plays a key role in the control of complex, sequential oral and facial movements in human speech [ 97 ]. The gene itself represents an ancient transcription factor, widely shared among vertebrates, and the human version contains two amino acid differences that are shared by virtually all humans and not present in chimpanzees or other primates [ 98 ]. Mutations in the gene in human clinical cases lead to severe vocal motor apraxia and speech deficits [ 99 ]. Proponents would cite the specificity of the mutated genes effects in humans: Sceptics would point out that FOXP2 is also expressed in the lungs and other tissues, that it also affects non-speech control of the mouth especially complex sequences of movements and that speech is not language.

Nonetheless, it seems likely that the selective sweep that drove the new, human allele of FOXP2 to fixation in the hominid population leading to modern humans had something to do with its role in human spoken language cf.

In Squirrel Hill’s Aftermath: Unity, Not Division

But again, this specific genetic mechanism defies simplistic attempts at functional categorization as general versus specialized. A similar point might be made about recent suggestions that intraspecific variation in genes associated with brain development might subtly affect the propensity of a population, over many generations, to adopt a tonal language [ ]. Although Broca originally considered this brain area to be specific to speech production, research on aphasics in the s suggested that the region also plays a central role in syntax perception e.

Furthermore, it is clear that both the cognitive and linguistic functions normally subserved by Broca's area can be accomplished by other brain regions in cases of early brain damage [ ]. That Broca's area is involved in general cognition, in addition to its linguistic functions, suggests that its linguistic specializations are a subset of more general, and presumably primitive, cognitive functions. Again, however, it is difficult to determine whether the non-linguistic functions of this region cognitive switching or music are non-adaptive by-products of some originally linguistic function, or whether the linguistic functions are specializations of some more general capacity.

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Furthermore, it is unclear why resolving this point should be a central concern of those interested in understanding the computations performed by this region of cortex, the core concern of neurolinguistics cf. What all of these examples make clear is that the distinction between general and linguistically specialized mechanisms is hard to draw, even in those cases where the mechanisms themselves seem fairly clearly defined. Most areas of language are not, and will not soon be, so clearly defined, and thus the distinction itself is of little use in furthering our understanding of the mechanisms.

The same is true, more so, for debates about the original function of these mechanisms cf. Thus, the long-running arguments surrounding such distinctions seem likely to continue generating much heat and little light, and to obscure the more basic empirical issues of what the basic mechanisms underlying language are, how they function at physiological and computational levels and whether or not they are shared with other species.

Neither the original meaning of the term universal grammar, nor Chomsky's later re-deployment of the term in its modern UG guise, depends on the degree of linguistic specialization of the universal constraints that act on the development of human language. Even the question of human specificity is irrelevant to whether a given cognitive mechanism plays a universal role in structuring human language: Core mechanisms underlying language can be innate and universal among humans without being either unique to language, or our species. The preceding review indicates both that abstract regularities concerning every aspect of language exist, and that the diversity of languages within these broad constraints is considerable, dwarfing that found in other animal communication systems.

These facts demand a perspective on the biological nature of language that encompasses both unity and diversity.

Similarly, the diversity and unity of the tetrapod hand [ ] can be understood in terms of the shared transcription factors regulating limb growth [ , ]. Many more examples of this kind are sure to follow, and enlightening genetic and developmental data are accumulating rapidly. The parallel with UG and particular languages seems unmistakable, and has informed linguistics thinking since the birth of generative linguistics [ 41 , 42 ].

Thus, it is perhaps not premature to seek a more general theoretical framework within which diversity and unity, in both biologically and culturally evolving systems, can be fruitfully integrated. Such systems are familiar: A differential equation is simply one that expresses the relationship between a variable and one or more of its derivatives as they change in time, and sometimes space.

Differential equations exist in many forms, but in general they are among the fundamental mathematical tools used by physicists: Newton's Laws, Maxwell's Laws, the wave equation and a vast array of other equations central to all branches of physics and biology are expressed as differential equations. In general, there are an infinite number of specific paths that could satisfy this constraint. If we denote a particular path or form of movement as a function f x , we can ask whether or not this function satisfies the constraint s embodied in the original equation.

Because there are an infinite number of solutions, we can think of this differential equation as defining a vast family of solutions, some of which may be superficially very different, but all of which have in common that they satisfy the constraint defined by the original equation. It is simple, but approximates in a general way many developmental or ecological growth processes. Parameters determining a particular solution include initial conditions and boundary conditions.

Although such a first-order model is obviously trivially simple compared with any actual biological system, it provides a well-understood mathematical metaphor for the kind of formal framework required to conceptually integrate a diversity of surface structure with unity of the underlying process.

The parallel with language is clear: Initially, a central task for studies of language diversity will be to find statistical abstractions that encompass the range of linguistic variability cf. The search for universals is akin to the search for a general solution that encompasses all of these particular solutions, and the goal of biolinguistics is to understand, and make explicit, the specific biological constraints that underlie this general solution.

Of course, we expect many such constraints to interact with each other over developmental, historical and evolutionary time [ ]. Chomsky has recently suggested that historical factors, like the Norman Conquest for English, probably play a central role in generating such diversity [ 42 ]. These interacting systems entail dauntingly complex systems of partial differential equations involving genes and the epigenetic control of their expression, brains and their self-wiring depending on the organism and its environment, and individuals as part of cultural systems.

Although at present I offer this parallel as a metaphor, it will become more than that as these systems become better understood. There can be little doubt that the mathematics of biological and cultural change will rely heavily on differential equations. Unfortunately, when it comes to the systems of nonlinear partial differential equations that typify real biological systems, there is no guaranteed way to find general solutions. In complex, real-world examples, nature provides a few examples of particular solutions, and the hard work is to find the constraints underlying such solutions and, perhaps, to discern general solutions.

Systems of interacting nonlinear equations exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions, bifurcations and chaos. Understanding the attractors that constitute general solutions in such systems represents a daunting frontier for theoretical biology [ , ]. No one expects such a task to be easy. Equally, no one can deny the fundamental significance of the search.

To conclude, I have suggested that progress in understanding the biological constraints underlying human language must, of course, attend to the vast diversity of human languages, which provide crucial insights into the range of particular solutions to the problems language poses. But such progress also requires a search for universals, in the abstract sense of cross-linguistic generalizations that has always been understood in modern linguistics [ 12 , 41 , 50 , 60 ].

This is equivalent to seeking the general solution encompassing these particular solutions. This search, even when incomplete, will provide essential fodder in the search for the underlying biological constraints. Rejections of the search for universals, based on a few exceptions to some otherwise universal rule, miss the point of this endeavour.

Arguments about whether the constraints are general to cognition, or specific to language or to humans, are in my opinion unlikely to help resolve the substantive biological issues involved in understanding the FLB. Nor will an attempt to divorce cultural processes from linguistic or biological processes help: While drawing distinctions between such categories may prove heuristically useful in some cases, treating them as dichotomies will simply impede progress. Future progress will require integrated discussions of language diversity and the underlying unity of the instinct to learn language.

As the neural and genetic data continue to flow in, we will increasingly need conceptual frameworks encompassing both diversity and unity, rather than dichotomies that polarize them. I thank William D. Fitch, Daniel Everett, Stephen Levinson, the editors and three anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier version.

National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract Human language is both highly diverse—different languages have different ways of achieving the same functional goals—and easily learnable. Introduction Because of its central role in human culture and cognition, language has long been a core concern in discussions about human evolution.

Hockett's design features of language, and resulting universals. Open in a separate window. A sampling of linguistic proposals concerning language universals. Jakobson [ 60 ], ch. General and specific solutions for an ordinary differential equation. Acknowledgements I thank William D. The descent of man and selection in relation to sex.

The instinct to learn. In The epigenesis of mind: The evolution of language. The evolution of the language faculty: Cognition 97 , — Science , — The development of language. The study of language. The roots of linguistic organization in a new language. The worlds simplest grammars are Creole grammars.

The myth of language universals: The faculty of language: Cognition 95 , — The cultural origins of human cognition.

Neurolinguistics 10 , — Issues 47 , 43— Evolution, selection, and cognition: Cognition 31 , 1— Natural language and natural selection. It explains the physics of electromagnetism, gravity, spacetime, and quantum mechanics as the singular beauty of nature. It also explores teaching, its limitations, and describes the relationship between life, death, duality, and unity.

Capturing the essence of natural and human behaviors, United Spectrum investigates the universe's unity and beauty, the reasons it's misunderstood, and how this limited view affects the world. Hardcover , pages. Published February 17th by Trafford Publishing first published February 1st To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

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