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 üniversal," 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.
- behavior,verbal
- behavior:
- cognitive
- comparison,culture,humans,linguistics,social
- environment,speech
- formation,concept
- formation:
- perception,speech
- perception:
- physiology
- physiology,concept
- physiology,cross-cultural
- physiology,verbal
- science,comprehension,comprehension:
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