[]() Where now?
If Chomsky has changed his mind so radically, where do linguists go now?
Many linguists devotedly followed Chomsky for around half a century, reading his latest books, and painstakingly working through them. Many felt abandoned when he changed his ideas so radically. As one linguist pointed out, he seemed to have played a Duke of York trick on them. The Duke of York figured in an old nursery rhyme:
The grand old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men.
He marched them up to the top of a hill
Then he marched them down again.
Chomsky, many linguists felt, had marched them up a transformational hill, then marched them down again. Furthermore, his books had become increasingly difficult to understand, at least for the average student. The time had come for a change.
Humans are undoubtedly ‘hard-wired’ for language, in that any normal child can learn any language. But given this innate predisposition to acquire language, maybe languages are not as complicated and abstract as Chomsky had suggested.
One of the most interesting developments in linguistics has been work on the origin of language (briefly mentioned in Chapter 2). Increasingly, linguists have been trying to divide language into its historical layers, and to see which might be the earliest. As the linguist Ray Jackendoff has pointed out in his book Foundations of language (2002, p. 264):
_The overall conclusion is that grammar is not a single unified system, but a collection of simpler systems … the evolution of the language capacity can be seen as …. adding more and more little tricks to the cognitive repertoire available to the child acquiring a language._
On a similar theme, Peter []()Culicover and Ray Jackendoff have published a book Simpler syntax (2005) in which they argue for a less convoluted linguistic faculty, and one that is better integrated with language processing, acquisition and biological evolution.
From the point of view of language acquisition, Michael Tomasello in his book Constructing a language (2003) has argued that there is no need to assume a dedicated, self-contained ‘language instinct’. Instead, he argues that our linguistic ability is interwoven with other cognitive abilities.
Meanwhile, a plethora of books under the general topic of ‘cognitive linguistics’ have argued strongly that language is governed by general cognitive principles. Information can be found in some of the books suggested in the section for further reading, which follows.