The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science

Abstract

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of "universal," we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition.Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills.

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“…It allows us to extend the typological base of vision-based research, in order to assess the extent to which our current models of formulation can adequately allow for language-specific instantiations of general principles. Current research has, of course, only scraped the surface of the astonishing range of linguistic diversity exhibited by the world's languages (Evans and Levinson 2009), so this remains an exciting empirical question.…”

Your place or mine? A phylogenetic comparative analysis of marital residence in Indo-European and Austronesian societies

“…Asking the same questions in different ethnographic regions heralds a useful step forward in our ability to infer the general mechanisms of cultural evolutionary change, that is, the identification of lineage-specific processes within global domains (cf. Evans & Levinson 2009). …”

Eliminating unpredictable variation through iterated learning

“…This is a key question in the cognitive sciences, and is central to the debate in linguistics over the relationship between the observed typological distribution of languages and psychological constraints on language acquisition (see e.g. Chomsky, 1965;Christiansen & Chater, 2008;Evans & Levinson, 2009): are the languages we see in the world a reflection of strong or even absolute constraints on possible languages imposed during acquisition, or might they also be a consequence of the interaction of multiple weaker constraints arising from acquisition and use?…”