Episode 89: John Collins discusses language universals
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What is a language universal and how is it defined?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. Before we get going today, I just thought I'd ask if you're a fan of the show, to maybe go to our iTunes page and leave a rating and a review, and that way more people can discover it. Alright, thanks.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago, but which today is being brought to you from Boston. I'm Matt Tykeman and with me is John Collins. Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. And he's here to discuss language universals. John Collins, welcome. Thanks,
Matt. It's great to be here.
Okay, language universals. So as I understand it, that's the general idea that there are certain features that are common to every human language. So human languages can't just be different in any old random way, but rather there are certain principles that apply to every single human language spoken on Earth, no matter what language it is. Is that right?
Yes and no. It's a tricky issue which has been the source, it seems to me, of um some confusion. One way of understanding the notion of universal is the notion that for any language one would look at, one w would find a particular kind of feature. So one may think, for instance, that tense is a universal, so look across all the world's languages, one would find tense being marked. So that's to say there would be some distinction in the language between descriptions of events that are happening now, between descriptions Of events that happened in the past or will happen in the future. Or one may think every language includes nouns or verbs, etcetera.
That seems like a big one, yeah. There's no language with no verbs or nouns, is there?
Well, for any universal anyone has um proposed along these lines, and they can be far more complicated than the ones I just presented, one can, it seems, find a a language out there that Well it uh one has to be careful actually. It's not straightforwardly obvious that a language is going to have some feature which you think i is there or not there. So in a sense one has to do some kind of analysis, some theoretical work, but still, it's not um immediately uh obvious that there are any such universals. There's some recent work which um goes through loads and loads and loads and cases of these, kind of putative cases of uh universals, and for each such case, counterexamples are offered. So Intuitively one would think, well, if that's the case
Then there are no linguistic universals. And also one has to bear in mind that um languages die and uh new languages develop. So for any would be universal, it looks as if it's an empirical bet whether it it's going to be universal 'cause you could discover language tomorrow as it were and this feature isn't there. Or there could be some language in the past Which for various reasons there's no way of recovering and this feature wouldn't be maybe this language dead language as well didn't have that feature. So That's one sense of universal. In other words, some feature that one would find across all the world's languages. There's another sense of universal, however, and it's the sense that I suppose is most associated with uh the idea of Noam Chomsky of universal grammar.
That idea is best approached, I think, by not asking the descriptive question of What features would one find in all the world's languages? But asking Grav the a question about acquisition. So here's a simple observation. every child, let's use the term normal child, so any child without specific kind of deficits. can acquire any language. It seems with equal ease. So we naturally, as say second language learners, would describe some languages as more difficult than other languages. Children, however, acquire the ambient language with seems equal ease. So we could take a Vietnamese child move it to Rio de Janeiro and the child is going to pick up Brazilian Portuguese as easy as it would Vietnamese or French if they moved to Paris.
So the question to then ask is what is it that each child has, as it seems a species property, that allows them to perform this feat, as it were.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is a language universal and how is it defined?
0:00–5:33
2
How does John Collins distinguish descriptive universals from Chomsky’s universal grammar?
5:33–11:07
3
Why is recursion considered a candidate universal feature of human language?
11:07–16:06
4
What evidence supports the existence of island constraints across languages?
16:06–21:16
5
How do universal grammar arguments relate to philosophical questions about human nature?
21:16–25:55
6
What are the main criticisms of the universal‑grammar hypothesis as Eurocentric?
25:55–30:56
7
How do linguists and philosophers differ on the scientific status of language universals?
30:56–36:29
8
What are the key take‑aways and future directions for research on language universals?
36:29–40:46
Speakers
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