Leaving the myth behind: A reply to

Behme, Christina; Evans, Vyvyan

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2015.05.004

Cited by 10 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 69 publications

(30 reference statements)

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“…Whilst the current paper is not a response to Evans (2014), it does address some of the concerns raised by it. Most significantly for the current paper, in a reply to Adger (2015), Behme & Evans (2015) throw down the following gauntlet for 'anyone who wishes to defend the Chomskyan framework':…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Place of Universal Grammar in the Study of Language and Mind: A Response to Dabrowska (2015)

Boxell¹

2016

Open Linguistics

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Generative Linguistics proposes that the human ability to produce and comprehend language is fundamentally underwritten by a uniquely linguistic innate system called Universal Grammar (UG). In her recent paper What is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it? Ewa Dabrowska reviews a range of evidence and argues against the idea of UG from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective. In the current paper, I take each of Dabrowska's arguments in turn and attempt to show why they are not well founded, either because of flaws in her argumentation or because of a careful consideration of the available empirical evidence. I also attempt to demonstrate how evidence from the fields Dabrowska reviews actually supports the notion of UG. However, arguments are additionally presented in favor of integrating an understanding of domain-specific UG with an understanding of domain-general cognitive capacities in order to understand the language faculty completely.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It does so on the basis of a large array of experimental evidence from Developmental and Cognitive Psychology, Neurobiology and Evolutionary Psychology. By these criteria, then, the current paper should go some way to making the contribution that Behme & Evans (2015) invite to the general debate on the place of UG in the human mind.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Place of Universal Grammar in the Study of Language and Mind: A Response to Dabrowska (2015)

Boxell¹

2016

Open Linguistics

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“…I argued in Adger (2015) that this attack is a failure, because it is aimed at a caricature of the generative viewpoint. Behme and Evans (2015) (hence BE15) responds to my argument but, as I'll show below, there's little content to that response. www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua The important point that emerges from this exchange, I believe, is that we linguists make better progress when we try to understand each other's work and learn from each other.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…From this experience, I know that interactions between people working from very different theoretical and methodological viewpoints can be enlightening, enriching and lead to a general improvement in theoretical understanding. Indeed, of the authors of Behme and Evans (2015), Evans at least, has made important contributions to linguistics in his work in Cognitive Grammar. Cognitive Grammar has made empirical discoveries with cross-framework relevance and developed insightful theoretical accounts of aspects of language that generative grammar has little to say about.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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More misrepresentation: A response to Behme and Evans 2015

Adger

2015

Lingua

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Review of Evans (2014): The Language Myth: Why language is not an instinct..

Toolan

2015

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Reviewed by Michael Toolan (University of Birmingham)Vyvyan Evans has an idée fixe -although it sometimes feels more like a leitmotiv, that comes around again and again, in the course of this commentary on the nature of language: what it is and where it comes from. His oft-returning theme is that contra Chomsky and the nativists, human language does not develop from a special module in the brain, an organ that normally matures in about seven years from birth, and one which genetically endows us with a set of powerful structureconstraining principles that enable us with remarkable rapidity to acquire a working grasp (well, it works for 2nd graders) of the one or more languages spoken to us and around us (our so-called native languages). Language is not an instinct and Steven Pinker and all of that ilk, prominently including Chomsky and Fodor (neither of whom, let us note, would dream of using Pinker's populist metaphor of 'instinct' , intended to reassure folk that acquiring the ambient language is as natural for children as web-spinning is for spiders), are wrong, wrong, wrong. A chatty series of chapters takes us through the main planks of the nativist-exceptionalist argument which Evans aims to refute: human language as radically unlike animal communication; language universals (where he focusses on Greenberg's surfacepattern typological universals, not Chomsky's more abstract UG ones); the innate endowment claim; language as a module in the mind (sic: not the brain); Mentalese; the (in)dependence of language and thought; and language and the mind.The book is repetitive in places, and chiefly a summarized synthesis of arguments that will be familiar both to older linguists and to younger ones who have read widely in work of the past half-century. Neither group will be excited by a book of this kind unless more new ideas are introduced than were apparent here. The argument pushes through a series of open doors: Evans declares that we learn our mother tongue using very general cognitive abilities rather than a special set confined within a language module in the brain; language is not autonomous but interrelated with all our other mental activity; language and mind and our dealings with others in the world all interrelate and interact profoundly. Sometimes the lengthy surveying of a field leaves one scarcely any clearer as to quite where

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Leaving the myth behind: A reply to

Cited by 10 publications

References 69 publications

The Place of Universal Grammar in the Study of Language and Mind: A Response to Dabrowska (2015)

The Place of Universal Grammar in the Study of Language and Mind: A Response to Dabrowska (2015)

More misrepresentation: A response to Behme and Evans 2015

Review of Evans (2014): The Language Myth: Why language is not an instinct..

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