![]() ![]() ![]() You would have thought I had spit on a crucifix during church. Looking back now, it is astounding that the point that has so inflamed my academic critics was my claim that the Pirahãs lacked subordinate clauses. It is likely that initially my work was picked up by the media because it was considered a problem for the core ideas of a man whom The New York Times sensationalistically labelled ‘the most important intellectual alive’, ie Chomsky. According to the different extremes in this debate, I am either an irrelevant, mistaken charlatan (Chomsky, in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo, February 2009) or an ‘instant folk hero’ who knocked all the wind from Chomsky’s work on universal grammar as no one before had ever done (Wolfe, in Harper’s Magazine, August 2016). I made it clear that this absence was not due to any inherent cognitive limitation on the part of its speakers, but due to cultural values, one in particular that I termed the ‘immediacy of experience principle’.Īlthough I realised that what I had written might be controversial, I was unprepared for the sheer number of academic papers, books and ad hominem attacks on me that have raged now for more than a decade provoked by that article. In 2005, I published a paper in the journal Current Anthropology, arguing that Pirahã – an Amazonian language unrelated to any living language – lacked several kinds of words and grammatical constructions that many researchers would have expected to find in all languages. While that debate rages, however, its focal point has come to be how much, if any, of human grammar is innate. Cognitive scientists are divided as to whether there is any such poverty, some even referring to it deprecatingly as the ‘poverty of imagination’ (on the part of Chomskyans). There are plenty of examples (and counterexamples) of this in the literature. This difference between what they know and the linguistic examples they are exposed to is known as the ‘poverty of the stimulus’. The principal evidence marshalled on behalf of this idea is that children know more than they could possibly have learned from the evidence available to them. This is the idea that there is something unique in human biology dedicated to language. ![]() From the late 1950s to the present, the American linguist has inspired thousands of articles and hundreds of books exploring what is referred to as the ‘language-acquisition device’. ![]() This has changed the debate a bit, engaging many more people than ever before, but now it’s centred around Wolfe, Noam Chomsky – and me.Īs background to understanding what’s at stake in this controversy, we need a grasp of Chomsky’s important theoretical proposals regarding human language acquisition. Most recently, the disagreements in the field have pulled the American author Tom Wolfe into the fray, with a new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and a cover story in Harper’s Magazine on the topic. And there is a controversy of just this type bubbling away for many years now in linguistics. Getting the public interested is good for science if it leads to deeper thinking about things that are of importance to understanding our species. But there are times when the subject or the participants in a debate so capture the public imagination that otherwise dry, technical matters of discord among researchers erupt into the media, eliciting a wide array of opinions from experts and non-experts. Few scientific disagreements lead to public controversy. ![]()
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