Attitude of Language

It is not easy to be systematic and objective about language study. Popular linguistic
debate regularly deteriorates into invective and polemic. Language belongs to
everyone, so most people feel they have a right to hold an opinion about it And when
opinions differ, emotions can run high. Arguments can start as easily over minor
points of usage as over major policies of linguistic education.

Language, more oven is a very public behavior so it is easy for different usages to be
noted and criticized No part of society or social behavior is exempt: linguistic factors
influence how we judge personality, intelligence, social status, educational standards,
job aptitude, and many other areas of identity and social survival. As a result, it is
easy to hurt, and to be hurt, when language use is unfeelingly attacked.

ln its most general sense. prescriptivism is the view that one variety of language has
an inherently higher value than others, and that this ought to be imposed on the whole
of the speech community. The view is propounded especially in relation to grammar
and vocabulary, and frequently with reference to pronunciation. The variety which ls
favoured, in this account, ls usually a version of the standard written language,
especially as encountered in literature, or in the formal spoken language which most
closely reflects this style. Adherents to this variety are said to speak or write
correctly'; deviations from lt are said to be 'incorrect`.

All the main languages have been studied prescriptlvely, especially in the 18th-
century approach to the writing of grammars and dictionaries. The aims of these early
grammarians were threefold: [a) they wanted to codify the principles of their
languages, to show that there was a system beneath the apparent chaos of usage. (b]
they wanted a means of settling disputes over usage, and (c] they wanted to point out
what they felt to be common errors, in order to improve' the language. The
authoritarian nature of the approach is best characterized by its reliance on 'rules' of
grammar Some usages are prescribed; to be learnt and followed accurately; others are
prescribed to be avoided. ln this early period, there were no half-measures: usage was
either right or wrong. and it was the task of the grammarian not simply to record
alliterative but to pronounce judgement upon them.

These attitudes are still with us, and they motivate a widespread concern that
linguistic standards should be maintained. Nevertheless, there is an alternative point
of view that is concerned less with standards than with the facts of linguistic usage.
This approach ls summarized in the statement that it is the task of the grammarian to
describe not prescribe to record the facts of linguistic diversity, and not to attempt the
impossible tasks evaluating language variation or halting language change. In the
second half of the 18th century, we already find advocates of this view, such as
Joseph Priestley, whose Rudiments of English Grammar (1761) insists that the
custom of speaking is the original and only just standard of any language. `Linguistic
issues, it is argued, cannot be solved by logic and legislation. And this view has
become the tenet of the modem linguistic approach to grammatical analysis.

In our own time, the opposition between descriptivists' and 'prescriptivists' has often
become extreme. with both sides painting unreal pictures of the other. Descriptive
grammarians have been presented as people who do not care about standards, because
of the way they see all forms of usage as equally valid. Prescriptive grammarians have
been presented as blind adherents to a historical tradition. The opposition has even
been presented in quasi-political terms - of radical liberalism vs elitist conservatism.
 This Marvellous Invention
A. Of all mankinds manifold creations, language must take pride of place. Other
inventions -the wheel, agriculture, sliced bread - may have transformed our material
existence, but the advent of language is what made us human. Compared to language,
all other inventions pale in significance, since everything we have ever achieved
depends on language and originates from it. Without language, we could never have
embarked on our ascent to unparalleled power over all other animals, and even over
nature itself.

B. But language is foremost not just because it came first. In its own right it is a tool
of extraordinary sophistication, yet based on an idea of ingenious simplicity: this
marvellous invention of composing out of twenty-five or thirty sounds that infinite
variety of expressions which, whilst having in themselves no likeness to what is in our
mind, allow us to disclose to others its whole secret, and to make known to those who
cannot penetrate it all that we imagine, and all the various stirrings of our soul This
was how, in 1660, the renowned French grammarians of the Port-Royal abbey near
Versailles distilled the essence of language, and no one since has celebrated more
eloquently the magnitude of its achievement. Even so, there is just one flaw in all
these hymns of praise, for the homage to languages unique accomplishment conceals
a simple yet critical incongruity. Language is mankind s greatest invention - except,
of course, that it was never invented. This apparent paradox is at the core of our
fascination with language, and it holds many of its secrets.

C. Language often seems so skillfully drafted that one can hardly imagine it as
anything other than the perfected handiwork of a master craftsman. How else could
this instrument make so much out of barely three dozen measly morsels of sound? In
themselves, these configurations of mouth p, f, b, v, t, d, k, g, sh, a, e and so on -
amount to nothing more than a few haphazard spits and splutters, random noises with
no meaning, no ability to express, no power to explain. But run them through the cogs
and wheels of the language machine, let it arrange them in some very special orders,
and there is nothing that these meaningless streams of air cannot do: from signing the
interminable boredom of existence to unravelling the fundamental order of the
universe.

D. the most extraordinary thing about language, however, is that one doesnt have to
be a genius to set its wheels in motion. The language machine allows just about
everybody from pre-modern foragers in the subtropical savannah, to post-modern
philosophers in the suburban sprawl - to tie these meaningless sounds together into an
infinite variety of subtle senses, and all apparently without the slightest exertion. Yet
it is precisely this deceptive ease which makes language a victim of its own success,
since in everyday life its triumphs are usually taken for granted. The wheels of
language run so smoothly that one rarely bothers to stop and think about all the
resourcefulness and expertise that must have gone into making it tick. Language
conceals art.

E. Often, it is only the estrangement of foreign tongues, with their many exotic and
outlandish features, that brings home the wonder of languages design. One of the
showiest stunts that some languages can pull off is an ability to build up words of
breath-breaking length, and thus express in one word what English takes a whole
sentence to say. The Turkish word ehirlilitiremediklerimizdensiniz, to take one
example, means nothing less than you are one of those whom we cant turn into a
town-dweller. (In case you were wondering, this monstrosity really is one word, not
merely many different words squashed together - most of its components cannot even
stand up on their own.)

F. And if that sounds like some one-off freak, then consider Sumerian, the language
spoken on the banks of the Euphrates some 5,000 years ago by the people who
invented writing and thus enabled the documentation of history. A Sumerian word
like munintuma'a (when he had made it suitable for her) might seem rather trim
compared to the Turkish colossus above. What is so impressive about it, however, is
not its lengthiness but rather the reverse - the thrifty compactness of its construction.
The word is made up of different slots, each corresponding to a particular portion of
meaning. This sleek design allows single sounds to convey useful information, and in
fact, even the absence of a sound has been enlisted to express something specific. If
you were to ask which bit in the Sumerian word corresponds to the pronoun it in the
English translation when he had made it suitable for her, then the answer would
have to be nothing. Mind you, a very particular kind of nothing: the nothing that
stands in the empty slot in the middle. The technology is so fine-tuned then that even
a non-sound, when carefully placed in a particular position, has been invested with a
specific function. Who could possibly have come up with such a nifty contraption?
Never mind whales, save the languages
WORRIED about the loss of rainforests, the ozone layer, quokkas? Well, none of
those is doing any worse than a large majority of the 6000 to 7000 languages that
remain in use on earth. One-half of the survivors will almost certainly be gone by the
middle of this century, while 40 per cent more will probably be well on their way out.
In their place, almost all humans will speak one of a handful of megalanguages -
Mandarin, English, Spanish - although often a poor version of them.
Linguists know what causes languages to disappear. Demographic shifts, government
neglect or suppression of regional and indigenous languages and the depredations of
mass media all play a role.
Less often remarked is what happens on theway to disappearance; languages'
vocabularies, grammars, and expressive potential all diminish.
"Say a community goes over from speaking a traditional Aboriginal language to
speaking a creole," says Nick Evans, an Australian National University linguist and
leading authority on Aboriginal languages. "Well, let's just use talking about the
natural world as an example. You leave behind a language where there's very fine
vocabulary for the landscape. Inside the language there's a whole manual for
maintaining the integrity of the landscape, for managing it, for using it, for looking for
stuff. All that is gone in a creole. You've just got a few words like 'gum tree' or
whatever."
As speakers become less able to process and express the wealth of knowledge that has
imbued ancestors' lives with meaning over millennia, it's no wonder that communities
tend to become demoralised, says Evans, who has dedicated his career to the tall order
of keeping shrinking languages going.
"There are times when what people speak is like seeing the world through very badly
made, thick glasses," he says. "You can avoid bumping into objects, but you don't see
all the beautiful detail."
Evans describes the dimensions of the loss, culled from his years of work in northern
Australian Aboriginal communities, in the recently released Dying Words:
Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us (Wiley-Blackwell). The
situation is so serious that it warrants a global effort to document and preserve
languages, he proposes.
How much would that cost? To train one linguist to document one struggling
language costs about $500,000. That covers doctoral training and two or three years
of postdoc work. "Multiply that by, say, 4000 languages," says Evans. "That's $2
billion."
Too much? It's small potatoes, compared with big-science budgets, he notes. "How
much did sequencing the human genome cost? A fair bit more than that, I'd think."
The scientific payoffs would be enormous, he says. That kind of Manhattan Project of
human speech would secure the raw data that linguists depend on to shape theories
about how language works. And even programs that only partially resuscitated
languages would reap social benefits. With the compilation of a dictionary, a
grammar, and other printed materials, "people suddenly see their language as
something immensely valuable, as something to be proud of, and to learn", Evans
says.
If the losses are so huge, why are relatively few linguists combating the situation?
Australian linguists, at least, have distinguished themselves by the preservation they
have achieved. Just as governments have supported documentation efforts in some
countries, including Germany, China, and Russia, Australian governments began in
the 1970s to back a major push that has resulted in good documentation of most of the
130 remaining Aboriginal languages, although almost all the survivors are at risk of
dying off.
In England, the Arcadia Fund (formerly Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund) has helped
another Australian linguist, Peter Austin, to direct one of the world's most active
efforts to stem language loss, at the University of London's School of Oriental and
African Studies. Austin, who like Evans studied at the ANU linguistics department
during the long tenure there of Aboriginal languages specialist Bob Dixon, heads a
program that has trained many documentary linguists in England as well as in
language-loss hotspots such as west Africa and South America.
At linguistics meetings in the US, where the endangered language issue has of late
been something of a flavour of the month, evidence is mounting that not all
interventions will be particularly helpful. Some linguists are boasting, for example, of
more and more sophisticated means of capturing languages: digital recording and
storage, internet and mobile phone technologies, and knowhow from such fields as
signal processing and global positioning systems. But those technologies, say some
doubters, are encouraging a "commando style" of recording trip: Zip in, switch on
digital recorder, clear off, download to hard drive, and nod at funding agencies'
requirement that speaker communities have access to gathered material.
That's not quite what some endangered language advocates have been seeking, for
more than 30 years. Most loud, and untiring, has been Michael Krauss, of the
University of Alaska. He has often complained that linguists are whistling Dixie while
most of their raw data disappears on the breeze.
Who is to blame? Noam Chomsky, say Krauss and many others. Or, more precisely,
they blame linguists who have fetishised the approaches of the most prominent of all
linguists. Documentary linguists, who go out into the field to study, record and
describe languages, argue that theoretical linguists, who draw conclusions about how
languages work, have held such sway that the field has largely ignored the death
throes of languages.
Chomsky, from his post at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been the
doyen of theoretical linguists for far longer than he has been a prominent political
commentator. In 1957, he published his landmark Syntactic Structures, which argues
that all languages exhibit certain universal grammatical features, encoded in the
human mind. American linguists, in particular, have focused largely on theoretical
concerns ever since, even while doubts have mounted about Chomsky's universals.
Austin and co are in no doubt that because languages are singular and irreducible,
even if they do tend towards common syntactic features, creating dictionaries and
grammars requires prolonged dedication and is inevitably a hard slog. As Krauss puts
it: "You learn a language by sitting there with people. You ask an old lady what she
calls various kinds of bushes."
That patient study may require knowledge of geographic features, farm tools,
ethnobotany, mythology, and oral literature. It requires that linguists remain alert not
only to languages' structural subtleties, but also the social, historical, and political
factors that bear on them.
It also calls for persistent funding of field scientists who may sometimes have to
wade, intrepid, into harsh and even hazardous settings. Once there, they may need
such non-linguistic skills as diplomacy in the face of community suspicion.
Evans makes no bones about showing communities that he is willing to fight for their
rights, linguistic and other. He often acts as an expert witness and interpreter in legal
proceedings relating to land rights, for example. He notes that because Aboriginal
community leaders expect to engage in give and take with visiting outsiders, linguists
canbuild relationships that permit "sustainable linguistics".
So much the better, he says, because endangered language communities have cause to
doubt or even oppose efforts to preserve their languages. They may have seen support
and funding for such projects as immersion schools come and go. They may have
ceased bothering to speak their languages to children, whom they believe will profit
from speaking a dominant tongue.
Plenty of students continue to be drawn to the intellectual thrill of linguistics field
work. Postgraduate programs have increased in several countries. That's all the more
reason to clear away barriers, contend Evans, Austin, and others. The highest, they
agree, is that the linguistics profession's emphasis on theory saps young field linguists
of their enthusiasm, over time.
Chomsky disagrees. He recently has begun to speak in support of language
preservation. But his linguistic, as opposed to humanitarian, rationale for that stance
is, let's say, unsentimental: The loss of a language, he states, "is much more of a
tragedy for linguists whose interests are mostly theoretical, like me, than for
descriptive linguists who focus on specific languages, since it means the permanent
loss of the most relevant data for general theoretical work".
There's a certain cold logic to that argument. Chomsky says he certainly deplores the
force that most often causes language deaths. "It's known as imperialism," he says.
But outrage about that damage, he argues, should not lead the profession essentially to
lower its standards by rewarding more greatly the documentation of languages.
At the moment, few institutions award doctorates for such work, and that's the way it
should be, he reasons. In linguistics, as in every other field, he believes that good
descriptive work requires thorough theoretical understanding and should also
contribute to building new theory.
But that's precisely what documentation does, objects ANU's Evans. The process of
immersion in a language, to extract, analyse, and sum it up, deserves a PhD because it
is "the most demanding intellectual task a linguist can engage in".
 Language diversity

One of the most influential ideas in the study of languages is that of universal
grammar (UG). Put forward by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, it is widely interpreted
as meaning that all languages are basically the same, and that the human brain is born
language-ready, with an in-built programme that is able to interpret the common rules
underlying any mother tongue. For five decades this idea prevailed, and influenced
work in linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. To understand language, it
implied, you must sweep aside the huge diversity of languages, and find their
common human core.

Since the theory of UG was proposed, linguists have identified many universal
language rules. However, there are almost always exceptions. It was once believed,
for example, that if a language had syllables1 that begin with a vowel and end with a
consonant (VC), it would also have syllables that begin with a consonant and end with
a vowel (CV). This universal lasted until 1999, when linguists showed that Arrernte,
spoken by Indigenous Australians from the area around Alice Springs in the Northern
Territory, has VC syllables but no CV syllables.

Other non-universal universals describe the basic rules of putting words together.
Take the rule that every language contains four basic word classes: nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs. Work in the past two decades has shown that several
languages lack an open adverb class, which means that new adverbs cannot be readily
formed, unlike in English where you can turn any adjective into an adverb, for
example soft into softly. Others, such as Lao, spoken in Laos, have no adjectives
at all. More controversially, some linguists argue that a few languages, such as Straits
Salish, spoken by indigenous people from north-western regions of North America,
do not even have distinct nouns or verbs. Instead, they have a single class of words to
include events, objects and qualities.

Even apparently indisputable universals have been found lacking. This includes
recursion, or the ability to infinitely place one grammatical unit inside a similar unit,
such as Jack thinks that Mary thinks that ... the bus will be on time. It is widely
considered to be the most essential characteristic of human language, one that sets it
apart from the communications of all other animals. Yet Dan Everett at Illinois State
University recently published controversial work showing that Amazonian Piraha
does not have this quality.

But what if the very diversity of languages is the key to understanding human
communication? Linguists Nicholas Evans of the Australian National University in
Canberra, and Stephen Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in
Nijmegen, the Netherlands, believe that languages do not share a common set of
rules. Instead, they say, their sheer variety is a defining feature of human
communication - something not seen in other animals. While there is no doubt that
human thinking influences the form that language takes, if Evans and Levinson are
correct, language in turn shapes our brains. This suggests that humans are more
diverse than we thought, with our brains having differences depending on the
language environment in which we grew up. And that leads to a disturbing
conclusion: every time a language becomes extinct, humanity loses an important
piece of diversity.
If languages do not obey a single set of shared rules, then how are they created?
Instead of universals, you get standard engineering solutions that languages adopt
again and again, and then you get outliers.' says Evans. He and Levinson argue that
this is because any given language is a complex system shaped by many factors,
including culture, genetics and history. There- are no absolutely universal traits of
language, they say, only tendencies. And it is a mix of strong and weak tendencies
that characterises the bio-cultural mix that we call language.

According to the two linguists, the strong tendencies explain why many languages
display common patterns. A variety of factors tend to push language in a similar
direction, such as the structure of the brain, the biology of speech, and the efficiencies
of communication. Widely shared linguistic elements may also be ones that build on a
particularly human kind of reasoning. For example, the fact that before we learn to
speak we perceive the world as a place full of things causing actions (agents) and
things having actions done to them (patients) explains why most languages deploy
these grammatical categories.

Weak tendencies, in contrast, are explained by the idiosyncrasies of different

languages. Evans and Levinson argue that many aspects of the particular natural
history of a population may affect its language. For instance, Andy Butcher at
Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, has observed that indigenous
Australian children have by far the highest incidence of chronic middle-ear infection
of any population on the planet, and that most indigenous Australian languages lack
many sounds that are common in other languages, but which are hard to hear with a
middle-ear infection. Whether this condition has shaped the sound systems of these
languages is unknown, says Evans, but it is important to consider the idea.

Levinson and Evans are not the first to question the theory of universal grammar, but
no one has summarised these ideas quite as persuasively, and given them as much
reach. As a result, their arguments have generated widespread enthusiasm,
particularly among those linguists who are tired of trying to squeeze their findings
into the straitjacket of absolute universals. To some, it is the final nail in UGs
coffin. Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has been a long-standing critic of the idea that all
languages conform to a set of rules. Universal grammar is dead, he says.
Daniel Everett: 'There is no such thing as universal grammar'
The rules of language are not innate but spring from necessity and circumstance, says
Daniel Everett

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/25/daniel-everett-human-
language-piraha

Daniel Everett is a linguist who is best known for his studies of the language of
the Pirah people of the Amazon basin. His new book, Language: The Cultural
Tool (Profile Books, 14.99), explores his theory that language isn't innate but a
tool developed by humans to solve problems.

You began as a missionary and then became a linguist. Can you tell me how that
happened?

I joined a organisation called Wycliffe Bible Translators that had the objective of
translating the Bible into all the languages of the world, and to do that you had to
study linguistics, and so that was my initial exposure to linguistics. The first phase of
Bible translation is to figure out how the language works. I realised that I wanted to
go on to graduate work.

Can you give me a very quick summary of the essential claim of this book?

There are two claims, the first is that universal grammar doesn't seem to work, there
doesn't seem to be much evidence for that. And what can we put in its place? A
complex interplay of factors, of which culture, the values human beings share, plays a
major role in structuring the way that we talk and the things that we talk about.

From your experience in the Amazon, and generally, what is it that makes
language possible?

Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that

are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together
they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is
community. Humans are a social species more than any other, and in order to build a
community, which for some reason humans have to do in order to live, we have to
solve the communication problem. Language is the tool that was invented to solve
that problem.

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You studied the Pirah community in the central Amazon. Is there something
especially interesting about Pirah language?

I was assigned there to translate the Bible for them because no one could figure out
the language it's not related to any other known living language. All languages have
unique characteristics, but the Pirah just seems to have so many unique
characteristics. Things that we didn't expect. I mean the absence of numbers, the
absence of counting and colours, the absence of creation myths, and the refusal to talk
about the distant past or the distant future. A number of things like this, including, the
special characteristic of recursion, the ability to keep a process going in the syntax
forever. This constellation of features really cried out for an explanation and, it took
me about 20 years to realise that there might be a unifying explanation for all of these
things. My experience with the Pirah was absolutely fundamental in shaping my
ideas about human language.

How long did it take you to learn?

There is no language in common, so I started off just pointing and learning nouns and
then verbs. I stayed in the village with my family for a year, initially, and at the end of
that year I could talk, I could say quite a few things. Within the next couple of years I
was saying pretty much what I wanted to say, and now it's a cumulative total of
almost eight years in the village and I speak the language very well.

And what did they make of you?

Well, initially they saw me as a sort of talking parrot. It was difficult for them to
understand when I was learning the language that I actually understood some of what
they were saying. They thought I was just mimicking them like some jungle animal,
and I would say something to them and they would say, "Look he sounds like us" and
they would talk about me. And I said: "But I do understand you, I am speaking
Pirah" and that was hard for them at first and the children would look at me open-
mouthed. But they accept me very well now.

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You talk about a grammar of happiness it's a lovely idea, but are you simply
perpetuating another myth?

I don't believe I am. In my first book, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, I describe them
as a very happy people. That doesn't mean everyone is happy all the time: they have
struggles, they have insecurities, they lose their temper, they face danger. But it was
actually a co-researcher who went with me from MIT and looked at the people and
said: "These must be the happiest people anywhere" and I said: "How would you
measure that?" and he said: "We might measure the amount of time they spend
laughing and smiling and compare that to any other society, because I don't see
anyone around here who is not laughing or smiling most of the time." There is a
strong contentment there that I haven't seen matched by any other society.

So you were not at risk?

I was initially, sure. They didn't see me initially as a human being in the same type as
they are. And they felt a bit threatened at first, when I started working there, even
though I was the third missionary group they'd met. They did threaten our lives on our
first visit.

In what way?

I woke up about midnight and heard them saying that a Brazilian trader had given
them whisky and a new shotgun to kill my family. They were saying: "I'm not afraid I
will kill the American." So I got up and I went through the jungle to where they were
talking. I knew they had all been drinking, so I just walked in and said: "Hello, how
are you doing?" and started grabbing up the bows and arrows and the shotgun. By the
time they realised what was going on I had everything in my arms and was back in
my house. And so they came, and they were fighting with one another and, as I was
walking back to my house I heard a voice to my side from the jungle say: "I'm going
to kill you right now" and it was a Piraha man and I thought I was going get either an
arrow or a shotgun blast to the face when I turned around, but he was just standing
there unarmed. And just drunk. And so I didn't get killed. But the next day they all
apologised, and they said: "Alcohol does funny things with our head" and I said: "It
does with everybody's heads, but I don't want this around my family, we can leave or
you can not do this again." So they said: "OK, we promise not to do it again." But
they did!

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They did?

Yeah, they have a problem with alcohol, American Indians from North and South
America lack the enzyme to break down alcohol so they don't process it like we do. A
little bit goes much further. They have real problems with that. But the Brazilian
government has been shutting off this trade so they don't have so much access to
alcohol any more. The Brazilian government does believe very strongly that people
shouldn't be able to take in alcohol to the Indians.

And when you go back, how do the Pirah greet you?

Oh, there's no greeting, the closest they have to a greeting is they will say: "Well, you
have arrived." That's the closest they have. They all know me, every living Pirah
knows me. There are about 750 of them today.

What do they call you?

My name in Pirah is Paouisa, which means old Pirah man who died, who is well
respected because I'm so ancient, they tell me, I have this name. They have an
average life expectancy of around 45 years, mainly because of malaria.

So what do you think is the lesson of all this from a linguistic point of view?

The lesson is that language is not something mysterious that is outside the bounds of
natural selection, or just popped into being through some mutated gene. But that
language is a human invention to solve a human problem. Other creatures can't use it
for the same reason they can't use a shovel: it was invented by humans, for humans
and its success is judged by humans.

Your theories about the origins of language differ from Noam Chomsky's idea of
universal grammar.

My view of language could hardly be further from Chomsky's. I try not to attack or to
say intemperate things in the book, in spite of his attacks (on me). I don't want to
come across as someone who's got a personal axe to grind. These are conclusions that
I have reached after 30 years of work, and I think Chomsky is absolutely wrong about
his most important claims, and I have tried to make my case with evidence.

And when you stand back from this, is it Aristotle and Plato all over again?

The roots of these theories go back, Chomsky's to Plato and mine goes back to
Aristotle. That's incredible isn't it? I mean how many good ideas were had by the
Greeks thousands of years ago?
 Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of
Language Learning
http://scotsenglish.edu.au/evidence-rebuts-chomskys-theory-language-learning