Language is a human capacity, so in fact there MUST be universal laws that govern it (to be more specific, this is true of human languages; aliens could have entirely different languages, but for any particular alien species, there will have to be some laws of the structure of that species' language).
How do you imagine language could develop (both evolutionarily and within each child that learns it)if there were no predetermined laws that restricted the set of possible word combinations? As Chomsky would say, if you think about it for a while, you will see that the alternative actually makes no sense.
That is not to say that the laws that Chomsky has identified must be correct. He could even be wrong about searching for universal laws at the level of grammar. But he has shown conclusively that there must be some universal structure that underpins all natural human languages.
Why should there be a predetermined law? I have never understood this argument and no, I don't "see that the alternative actually makes no sense". I would like to see some facts that support it, something its followers have failed to delivered for how many decades now?
Still looking for those facts, are we?
All of this ends up with a huge combinatory explosion of possible ways to assign meaning to language, requiring a huge amount of examples and counter examples to actually learn a human language. Just look at the training corpuses of something like GPT-X to see the amount of information that is required to learn elements of a human langauge if you start without any assumptions.
However, we know for a fact that human children get many orders of magnitude less examples of languahe use before learning a language - far too little to actually rule out all other possible structures if they had started with 0 assumptions.
Adding to this, there are certain elements of language structure that are not commonly thought about that happen to work identically in all natural languages that have been studied, sucha s the fact that order of words in a sentence matters, or the way certain words are omitted when constructing embedded sentences (e.g. 'can eagles that fly swim?' always having 'can' refer to 'swim', never 'fly').
Anyway, this discussion is going nowhere. Notify me if there is other evidence apart from "I cannot imagine how the human brain can do that". As other people have written in a similar thread some months ago, this is pseudo-science.
From my own readings, I thought that there is very good evidence adults don't bother to correct children in a lot of cases, and that children ignore the corrections completely anyway. They also don't seem to make the kinds of mistakes that you'd expect.
A great summary of some of some research I've been reading on this is the paper [1]. Also Steven Pinker's early work [2] is fascinating and easy reading.
I would love to bring myself up to date though, if these things have changed lately. Any help appreciated.
[1] Gleitman & Newport paper The Invention of Language by Children - https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~gleitman/papers/Gleitman%20&%20Ne...
[2] Steven Pinker - Why the Child Holded the Baby Rabbits - http://socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/courses/readings/Pinker1995Ch5...
Couldn't agree more. It's barely even that, it's kind of just armchair philosophizing. (which is fun and often actually useful, but not sufficient to make claims about universal laws)
I disagree. There's a strong desire from a western scientific mindset that everything be possible to reduce and turned into laws and models, but that doesn't mean everything works like that. It's putting the cart before the horse.
> How do you imagine language could develop (both evolutionarily and within each child that learns it)if there were no predetermined laws that restricted the set of possible word combinations? As Chomsky would say, if you think about it for a while, you will see that the alternative actually makes no sense.
This is just armchair philosophizing, reminds me a lot of "praxeology". And even if it was true, which I don't believe at all, that doesn't mean that he or anyone else can successfully identify and articulate them.
> But he has shown conclusively that there must be some universal structure that underpins all natural human languages.
I don't see that at all and while I happily admit I'm not a linguist I'm sure there are countless actual linguists who would agree Chomsky is a bit of an emperor with no clothes.
I wouldn't think so either. That's what makes the claim, whether its right or wrong, interesting.
> And I guess I just don't see the point making any claims of universal laws.
Well it sets a goal post and leads to further questions. Are there exceptions? Why are these features universal and not others? Why is any feature universal? If there are exceptions and they're rare what makes them different from the other cases? Etc.
> "these are incredibly ubiquitous features and here's some useful abstractions and models"
If your model/abstraction doesn't differ from the ground truth as far as we know (or the proposer doesn't believe it does), what's the difference between that at claiming universality.
I'd claim that reality is just a model we don't yet know is wrong. For a long time we would say newtonian mechanics was universal. Now we say its a model that works at low velocity (relative to c). Was it wrong to claim universality back when we weren't aware of any counter examples?