David W. Lightfoot

Biology and Language: a response to Everett (2005)

In a recent review article in this journal, Everett (2005) finds our book Anderson & Lightfoot 2002 (as well as Givon 2002) seriously lacking and unpersuasive in the case it attempts to make for the importance of an understanding of the human language faculty as an aspect of our species’ biology. Negative reviews are of course a feature of academic life, but Everett’s piece exhibits enough misconceptions and misrepresentations, both of our work and of the nature of biology, to warrant a response. We note that while Everett backhandedly compliments us for a number of carefully argued analyses, he simultaneously asserts (without discussion) that these are artificially restricted and do not bear the weight of our conclusions. A striking feature of his review is that he discusses and criticizes the analyses and views of others, rather than those presented in the book under review. His summary of our book deals with each chapter in a summary of a few lines (p. 160) — his chapter-by-chapter summary of Givón’s book is much more detailed — and does not engage most of what we had to say. For instance, he laments the fact our book contains “no biological discussion of any depth,” although our chapter 10, entitled ‘The organic basis of language,’ attempts a survey of the literature bearing on the relation of the language faculty to specific tissue and its observable properties, intended for the use of our target audience of scientifically literate non-linguists. It is true that (like Givón, and Everett) neither of us “has any serious credentials in neurophysiology,” but while we make no claim to originality in this chapter, we do feel it makes serious contact with the existing literature of the field. Everett devotes two lines to that chapter.

The Language Organ: Phonetics and the I -linguistics of speech

A theory of language that focuses on the properties of external linguistic objects, the sort of thing we have been calling E-language, tends to limit itself to a preoccupation with the nature of representations of those objects. For instance, in the period of structuralist phonemics, the theory of phonemic representations was the theory of sound structure. As we saw in chapter 4, it was on the basis of arguments about the nature of representation that generative phonology supplanted structuralism, even though the more basic issue distinguishing the two points of view hinged on the rather different issue of the place of rules in linguistic description. Just because I-language theories are not limited to matters of representation , however, does not mean that they do not involve such questions. For instance, within the evolution of generative phonology, discussion of au-tosegmental structure and especially feature geometry (see Kenstowicz 1994 for a survey) marked a return to issues of representation in the study of sound structure, as other areas of inquiry seemed to lead to dead-ends in the 1970s. The focus in recent work on Optimality Theory as reviewed in chapter 5 has generally held issues of representation more or less constant, but as attention has turned to the phonetic motivation for constraints, the nature and content of phonetic representations has once again surfaced as an important issue. Representations in general have increasingly been the focus of interest within contemporary cognitive science, as a consequence of its notion of the mind as an information-processing system. If this sort of picture is to become science, however, we must be careful to specify the form of the 129 [Excerpted from Anderson & Lightfoot (2002)The Language Organ. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press]