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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 54
• It is present only in humans.
• Language is learned extraordinarily quickly, and probably with critical
periods (i.e. the faculty stops operating properly if not employed at
the right period of maturation).
• We appear to learn far more than we have evidence for in our linguistic
surroundings – this is often referred to, following Chomsky, as
Plato’s problem or as the problem of the poverty of the stimulus.
• Despite different inputs, speakers of the same variety seem to end up
with very closely matching grammars.
These factors, it is suggested, make the language faculty seem much more like
something with which we are biologically endowed, like the facility for sight,
than like something which we learn, like the ability to do arithmetic.
It should be said that many of these reasons have been challenged, with a
greater or lesser degree of success. There is, for example, a large literature
devoted to the idea that some animals other than humans have linguistic abilities.
My personal judgement about this literature is that it is ultimately not convincing,
and that the astonishing abilities demonstrated by some of the animals
that have been studied still do not approach the even more astonishing abilities
demonstrated by human children. Similarly, the notion of critical period has
been questioned, as has the notion of the poverty of the stimulus, that is, the
idea that we are presented with insufficient data from which to deduce the form
of a linguistic system. In the end, though, the crunch question here is to what
extent humans are specifically pre-programmed for language, and how far language
is a by-product of other things for which humans are hard-wired. The
Chomskyan answer is that there is a specific language faculty. Yet when we look
at the evidence from the FOXP2 gene, fancifully dubbed by the popular press
a ‘gene of speech’, and important because it is the first time it has been shown
that a fault in an individual gene can cause lack of ability to use language fully,
it turns out that the gene affects, among other things, the ability to articulate
smoothly. While this may be a necessary facility for the efficient exploitation of
spoken language, in itself it does not provide any evidence for the hard-wiring
of anything as specific as language.
Universal Grammar
If we accept that the language faculty is hard-wired into humans in an organlike
way, we must nevertheless accept that what humans have is a facility to
acquire language, rather than the facility to acquire a particular language.
Orphans whose parents spoke one language and who are adopted at an early
age by speakers of a different language in a different country end up speaking
the language of their adoptive community, and do not have any built-in benefit