topics: |  language | grammar | cognitive | development | chomskyan

While the excesses of chomskyan formalism are dying in cognitive sciences
in general, Roeper continues to charge at the windmills.

The thesis here is that grammar is everything: every human thought and
action is built by grammar-like rules....

While the justification (the "humanism") - involves mostly meaning, Roeper
conveniently ignores semantics - as in most of late Chomsky - and focuses
solely on surface syntax.

from intro by Samuel Jay Keyser

In his book The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond suggests that
what distinguishes our species, Homo sapiens, from other members of the
tree of human evolution is innovation.

[This propensity to try to separate humans from other animals is more of a
Judaeo-Christian view.  I am not sure why it should matter so much. ]

Neanderthal man, he argues, provides an instructive comparison. Here is
what he says. The earliest examples of complete Neanderthal skeletons date
to about 130,000 years ago. They may be even older. The latest skeletons
date to about 40,000 years ago. During that entire 90,000-year period,
there was absolutely no change in Neanderthal culture as reflected in its
artifacts. The tools of the earliest Neanderthals are identical to the
tools of the latest:

    Today we take cultural differences among people inhabiting different
    areas for granted. Every human population alive today has its
    characteristic house style, implements, and art.... No such cultural
    variation is apparent for Neanderthals, whose tools look much the same
    whether they come from France or Russia. (p. 43)

He then describes the cultural changes of Cro-Magnon man, the earliest known
European example of Homo sapiens. The changes are staggering. Earliest tools
evolved and were refined. Art, even superb art — for example, the Lascaux cave
drawings — suddenly appeared. And in the thousand years that passed from the
earliest to the latest Lascaux cave drawings, drawing and coloring techniques
clearly got better and better. In other words, about 40,000 years ago there
was a revolution. A creature suddenly appeared on the savannahs of Africa
capable of constant and volatile change. Sound familiar? This is how Diamond
describes it:
    These variations of culture in time and space are totally unlike the
    unchanging monolithic Neanderthal culture. They constitute the most
    important innovation that came with our rise to humanity: namely, the
    capacity for innovation itself. To us today, who can’t picture a world in
    which Nigerians and Latvians in 1991 have virtually the same possessions
    as each other and as Romans in 50B.C., innovation is utterly natural. To
    Neanderthals, it was evidently unthinkable. (p. 50)

If Diamond is right to think that innovation is the sine qua non of being a
human being, then perhaps human language is the engine of that
innovation. This, at any rate, lies at the heart of the book you are about to
read. Roeper writes:
    A major theme of this book is that systematic creativity is what is
    special about every human being....

[AM:  The point to note: innovations in art and culture - are they explained by
	syntax or by semantics?]

To get perspective on grammar, we start with a grammar-style vision of human
nature itself. Going well beyond Diamond, Roeper's thesis is that grammar is
everything: Every human thought and action is built by grammar-like rules. It
may seem odd or bold to assert that grammar is a model for how everything in
the mind works. My argument goes further:

    The body is just an extension of the mind. The body is designed to
    express the mind — the opposite of the common view that the body is real
    and the mind an illusion. The mind as pervasive is what we see when we
    adjust our focus to a microscopic level.

---
   Professor Roeper works primarily in theoretical approaches to language
   acquisition and morphology. His current work is the acquisition of
   wh-movement with Jill de Villiers of Smith College. In morphology he has
   focused on implicit arguments, productive morphology, and lexical rules.