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The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches To Language Structure, Volume I

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This book is a welcome and clear-headed exposition of functional approaches to linguistics, from a lot of perspectives.

Here's the contents:

M. Tomasello -- Introduction to the Volume: Some Surprises for Psychologists.
L. Talmy -- Concept Structuring Systems in Language.
J. DuBois -- Discourse and Grammar.
S. Kemmer -- Human Cognition and the Elaboration of Events: Some Universal Conceptual Categories.
C. Ford, B. Fox, S. Thompson -- Social Interaction and Grammar.
J. Bybee -- Cognitive Processes in Grammaticalization.
K. van Hoek -- Pronouns and Point of View: Cognitive Principles of Coreference.
B. Comrie -- On Explaining Language Universals.
M. Haspelmath -- The Geometry of Grammatical Meaning: Semantic Maps and Crosslinguistic Comparison.
C. Fillmore, P. Kay, M.C. O'Connor -- Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of "Let Alone"

Amazon doesn't have editorial desdescription on this book, so I'll quote the publisher's blurb:

"From the point of view of psychology and cognitive science, much of modern linguistics is too formal and mathematical to be of much use. The newly emerging approaches to language termed "Functional and Cognitive Linguistics," however, are much less formally oriented. Instead, functional and cognitive approaches to language structure are typically couched in terms already familiar to cognitive scientists: perception, attention, conceptualization, meaning, symbols, categories, schemas, perspectives, discourse context, social interaction, and communicative goals.
The account of human linguistic competence emerging from this new paradigm should be extremely useful to scientists studying how human beings (not formal devices) comprehend, produce, and acquire natural languages. The current volume brings together 10 of the most important linguists in cognitive and functional linguistics whose work is often not easily available to those outside the field. In original contributions, each of these scholars focus on an important aspect of human linguistic competence, with a special eye to readers who are not professional linguists. Of special importance to all of the contributions are the cognitive and social interactional processes that constitute human linguistic communication. The book should be of special interest to psychologists, cognitive scientists, psycholinguists, and developmental psycholinguists, in addition to linguists taking a more psychological approach to language."

I was a graduate student in Math and later Economics at Harvard in the heady years during which Noam Chomsky, down Mass Ave at MIT, was revolutionizing not just linguistics, but all of psychology as well (recall his famous critique of Skinnerian behavioral psychology in his review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior, which inaugurated modern cognitive psychology). Many of my friends and acquaintances in philosophy at Harvard and MIT, including Jerry Katz who was working with Jerry Fodor at the time, were generating genuinely new insights into philosophical psychology and epistemology. I recall sitting around listening to them talk and feeling that perhaps intellectual life was something real, not just books and exams.

The two things I really liked about structural linguistics were, first, that it was a science of human behavior, and I hated then, as I do now, all of those wishy-washy types that denied that a science of human behavior was possible (in the old days it was "critical theory," while today it is "post-modernism"). Second, without knowing exactly why, I never bought either the "tabula rasa" view promoted by Locke and the other English Associationist philosophers of the time, or Kant's response, the "synthetic a priori" category of knowledge. Now I know that what was missing was sociobiology: the notion that we are evolved creatures and we have a basic nature laid down through the long, drawn-out process of gene-culture coevolution.

While Chomsky and his closest colleagues never really bought the notion that human language is an adaptation (perhaps they did not understand gene-culture coevolution), they definitely considered the existence of a universal grammar and the ease with which children acquire language to imply that humans have something like a "language module" in the brain that gives us the structure, if not the content, of language. I always accepted the idea of a language model, despite its affinity to Kant's synthetic a prior, because the facts seemed overwhelming.

Recent years have seen serious alternatives to structural linguistics and its accompanying ontological baggage. I am not a linguist and do not feel competent to judge the relative merits of the various arguments (I would actually like to see a serious attack on the new-fangled theories by members of the Chomsky camp, but I have not found one yet). Nevertheless, I can say that the development of evolutionary developmental psychology in recent years (so-called "evo-devo") does heighted the possibility of an alternative model of human language, rooted in the evolved social nature of our species. This is because we have learned that the ontogeny of the human brain, and not only its phylogeny, is deeply evolutionary: the brain development of a child is a process of what might be called "survival of the fittest" on the level of the neuronal structure of the brain. In particular, a new-born has far more neurons that a three-year old, and which neurons survive and connect to others, and which become isolated and die, is a function of the child's environment and his interaction with other intentional beings. Thus, many behaviors which early evolutionary psychology attributed to "dedicated modules" (e.g., for recognizing faces, for forming plurals, for detecting cheaters, for behaving morally) are in fact dynamically ontogenetic products of a generalized capacity for the human brain to learn and creatively intervene in its environment. The human brain is simply not modular.

Structural linguistics is extremely impressive, with numerous analytical accomplishments and its ability to explain arcane aspects of many languages. Tomasello and his colleagues appreciate this analytical virtuosity, but claim that it is base on a highly restricted set of languages, mostly related to European languages. Moreover, its several successes in formally modeling has led, they hold, to a situation where the structural linguists have become satisfied to develop more and more arcane theoretical points, without the need to verify them in terms of real human linguistic behavior.

The most important weakness of the traditional theory, Tomasello suggests, is that its evidence is almost exclusively based on written language, and there is a huge gap between written texts and oral behavior. Tomasello and his colleagues, by contrast, base their models on "spontaneous spoken speech" (SSS). Based on speech, they argue that "there are very few if any specific grammatical constructions or markers that are universally present in all languages...Typological research has also established beyond a reasonable doubt that not only are specific grammatical constructions not universal, but basically none of the so-called minor word classes of English...are universal across languages either." (p. 5)

I am embarrassed to say that I find the studies deployed in this edited collection persuasive, but I still yearn for the structural diagrams and formal mathematical language of the structuralist school. So sue me.