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First Year Review and Proposal

How language is learned is a crucial question for the evolution of language. In this review of my first year, I question the validity of the model of language as a mapping from internal representations to external ones. The idea that this is a necessary mechanism for a language is, I think, a mistake. Insistence on internal representations suffers the problem that there is no independent way of fixing their content other than by identity with the word or the way the word is used. Thus their content cannot help in explanations of humans using language. Given that we have no idea how these representations would be instantiated in the brain, their form may be anything. We have no way of knowing how a mental representation would be involved in activities other than those for which it is defined. We have, for example, no idea how a child’s “representation” of a tree would be “mapped” to the word tree. Thus stipulating the existence of mental representations and mapping processes gets us no closer to understanding language learning. Analysis of children learning language suggests that the mapping metaphor has little utility in accounting for patterns of language acquisition. It seems that rather than learning how to express pre-linguistically present functions, children learn to use language: it is from the language that they learn what language is for. This review may get a bit polemical in places. However, if I am wrong about the nature of language, basing accounts of the evolution of language on empirical accounts of child language acquisition seems to me to be an improvement on basing them on abstract linguistic theories, and this is what I intend to do with the rest of my PhD. The two appendices are not really necessary to either the review of the proposal. Appendix A argues that every coherent linguistic description will be instantiated in the brain. Appendix B questions the notion that choices can be made between linguistic meta-theories on the basis of language data. That is, multiple linguistic theories are possible, and if they describe their object coherently, they will all be instantiated in a physical description of a language user. The appendices contain criticism of certain ideas in linguistics: linguistic theories are in competition to be the correct theory ; language learning and the evolution of language can be understood from a theory whose object is adult