Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing

by Morten H. Christiansen, Nick Chater, Peter W. Culicover (Foreword)

A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences. Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through the processes of cultural evolution. Christiansen and Chater propose a revolutionary new framework for understanding the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, offering an integrated theory of how language creation is intertwined across these multiple timescales. Christiansen and Chater argue that mainstream generative approaches to language do not provide compelling accounts of language evolution, acquisition, and processing. Their own account draws on important developments from across the language sciences, including statistical natural language processing, learnability theory, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults. Christiansen and Chater also consider some of the major implications of their theoretical approach for our understanding of how language works, offering alternative accounts of specific aspects of language, including the structure of the vocabulary, the importance of experience in language processing, and the nature of recursive linguistic structure.

Genres: Linguistics, Psychology, Science

330 pages, Hardcover

Published March 18, 2016

About the author

Morten H. Christiansen is the William R. Kenan, Jr. professor of psychology at Cornell University as well as a senior scientist at the Haskins Labs and professor in cognitive science of language at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. He is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and has edited four books. He lives near Ithaca, New York.

Reviews

[Mike Putnam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book that adds much to the debate on the evolution of language. Similar to other scholars who espouse a usage-based, construction grammar approach to language and cognition, Christiansen presents arguments in favor of language being the adapted to the brain, rather than vice versa. Under this view, language acquisition, processing, and evolution can/should be studied in tandem (i.e., Culicover's argument).

The discussion and development of the Chunk-and-Pass strategy (Chapter 4) also makes a strong case for a parallel architecture of grammar (Jackendoff 1997, 2002). The notion of chunking has also been treated recently in generative approaches (Fasanella & Fortuny 2016), and represents a possible fertile ground of research on language and cognition from myriad perspectives in the future.

My only 'criticism' of this work is the short shrift Christiansen gives to alternative generative and emergent approaches to modeling grammar, which, at least at first blush, appear to also be ideal candidates for Chunk-and-Pass processing (such as LFG, HPSG, and the family of Harmony Theory grammars).

[Jan Havlis · Rating 5 out of 5]

extraordinary fresh view on language, encarnalising all my intuitions. it sums up and transforms almost two decades of linguistic research into intriguing new hypothesis which has a potential to overcome the discrepancies between generative & formalistic and psycholinguistic approaches. it allows us to take a new angle of view, which may be able to deal with until now unresolvable contradicting findings of the previous mentioned approaches. i have to cool down and go through it few more times, but hey, i am excited.

[Othman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book incorporates the intuition that language evolved uses domain-general mechanisms, and is not modular as argued in the generative school. I found myself skipping most of the book because I'd read similar claims elsewhere, but I'd recommend this book to those who want to have an overview of what functionalists have proposed for language evolution and acquisition.

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't make it very far into this; it was too technical for me.

[Roy Kenagy]

ACADEMIC PRECURSOR TO POPULAR LANGUAGE GAME?