On the status of linguistics as a cognitive science

Abstract

In the last fifty or so years, the field of linguistics has become concerned with the study of language as a means for understanding how the mind works. Linguistic theories that advocate the idea that structure-building computations underlie human grammar have been assumed to reveal the same type of computational operations present in theories of other modules of the mind. At the same time, with the emergence of new scientific technical advances, more concrete and tangible light is being shed on how the brain actually operates in terms of both its mechanisms and the loci of activity that correspond to specific functions. In MRI studies of language in use (and other similar studies using different types of techniques), various areas of the brain have been shown to exhibit activity, rather than just one central location, and the idea of language emerging out of a network of interconnected distinct brain circuits or systems has become, for the most part, widely acceptable. Yet, generative grammarians, assuming a level of analysis that is not primarily concerned with such neurological findings, continue to consider language to be an autonomous and homogeneous entity unto itself in the mind, namely, a module, an innate organic whole, the maturational process of which is shaped by triggers in the environment, and which is, in essence, a computational system of combining or merging building block-like elements together in a recursive fashion to form hierarchical structures. This approach appears to be removed from the aforementioned findings regarding the physically scattered locales of language in the brain (but, cf. Marantz’s contribution to this special issue which finds no tension between current findings from brain science and generative linguistic theory).