Challenging Chomskyan Linguistics: The Case of Piraha

摘要

Chomsky's theory of language is an accomplishment of the highest order, by any standards. A set of ideas that can excite and occupy some of the brightest minds in the world for over 5 decades, and give them all a sense of communality and feeling that they are engaged in an asymptotic approximation to the Truth, over this entire period of time, must be taken very seriously. What are the components of this theory? There are 2 fundamental ideas: (1) there are components of the form of grammars that are arbitrary from the perspective of meaning and computation (in some senses), but which form a regular and elegant subsystem that underlies the interpretation and physical manifestation of language, and (2) these components are part of our genetic endowment as Homo sapiens with no real explanation in standard Darwinian theory. Also important to Chomsky's theory in principle and in practice is the idea that communication and the sociocultural milieu from which language might be argued to have emerged really have very little, perhaps nothing, to do with the core components of these genetically carried grammatical principles, labelled Universal Grammar (UG).