Evans & Levinson/Myth of Language Universals: BBS Call for Commentators

Dear Dr. Qwerty, ================================================================== *** CALL RESPONSE INSTRUCTIONS *** ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Evans-08042… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. * Please respond to this Call no later than March 20, 2009. NOTE: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) is an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/associnst.html ================================================================== ** Target Article Information ** ================================================================== To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an unedited, uncorrected target article is retrievable at the URL that follows the abstract and keywords below. This unedited draft has been prepared only for potential commentators who wish to nominate themselves for formal commentary invitation. Please DO NOT write a commentary until you receive a formal invitation. If you are invited to submit a commentary, a copyedited, corrected version of this paper will be posted in the invitation letter. The commentary invitation list is compiled by the Editors so as to balance proposals, areas of expertise, and frequency of prior commentaries in BBS. TITLE: The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science AUTHORS: Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson ABSTRACT: Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. The article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6-8000 languages. After surveying the various uses of 'universal', we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, then examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. While there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition. Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system which is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognising the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills. KEYWORDS: Chomsky, coevolution, constituency, culture, dependency, evolutionary theory, Greenberg, linguistic diversity, linguistic typology, recursion, universal grammar http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Evans-08042008/Referees/ ================================================================== *** CALL RESPONSE INSTRUCTIONS *** ================================================================== Please DO NOT respond to this email. If you wish to submit a proposal for commentary and/or suggest potential commentators, please go to the Online Commentary Proposal System at the following URL: http://www.bbsonline.org/perl/commentary/commproposal?authordir=Evans-08042… * If you only wish to suggest potential commentators, please ignore prompts to submit a proposal with expertise information. * If you experience technical difficulties, please email bbs(a)bbsonline.org. * Please respond to this Call no later than March 20, 2009. NOTE: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) is an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates, or suggested by a BBS Associate. If you are not a BBS Associate, please follow the instructions linked below: http://www.bbsonline.org/associnst.html ================================================================== ================================================================== Barbara Finlay - Editor Paul Bloom - Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org -------------------------------------------------------------------