Abstract
The state of the art of the debate between externalist and internalist concepts of language is reviewed in this paper, and a new conceptualization of language as a “developmental hybrid” is suggested that entails that it equally comprises environmental and organism-internal component pieces, in an ultimately non dissociable way. The key for understanding this hybrid status is to be found in development, for when individually evolving, a general dynamic is observed in which organism-internal facilities selectively apply to certain designated aspects of the environmental stimulus, which in their turn have a facilitatory impact on these very same facilities. These kinds of loops inspire the conclusion that the internal and the external compose a single, integrated developmental unit.
Highlights
1 Introduction The emergence and consolidation of the field of Evolutionary Linguistics in the last few decades, has brought to the fore with a new impetus the question that mostly worried Ferdinand de Saussure when he took the first steps into the discipline of Linguistics as we know it today: What kind of object language is that it deserves a scientifically specialized attention? The situation is aptly captured by Bolhuis et al (2014: 1), who claim that there is a general “lack of clarity regarding the language phenotype,” which inevitably leads to a corresponding “lack of clarity regarding its evolutionary origins.”
The picture gets even more complicated if one takes into account, for example, Ray Jackendoff’s contention that even among those who share a similar ontological commitment about language—e.g. those who share “the contemporary view of language, which goes beneath the cultural differences among languages” (Jackendoff 2010: 63), a basic mutual understanding is made difficult by the volatility of each researcher’s theoretical biases
The aspect of the story that we want to stress here is that the expected move that followed towards a strong internalist stance has not been rectified throughout the subsequent decades, as one would expect as the paradigm tried to synchronize with biological theory under the umbrella term of “Biolinguistics” (Chomsky 2007a; Boeckx & Grohmann 2012)
Summary
The emergence and consolidation of the field of Evolutionary Linguistics in the last few decades, has brought to the fore with a new impetus the question that mostly worried Ferdinand de Saussure when he took the first steps into the discipline of Linguistics as we know it today: What kind of object language is that it deserves a scientifically specialized attention? The situation is aptly captured by Bolhuis et al (2014: 1), who claim that there is a general “lack of clarity regarding the language phenotype,” which inevitably leads to a corresponding “lack of clarity regarding its evolutionary origins.” The picture gets even more complicated if one takes into account, for example, Ray Jackendoff’s contention that even among those who share a similar ontological commitment about language—e.g. those who share “the contemporary view of language, which goes beneath the cultural differences among languages” (Jackendoff 2010: 63), a basic mutual understanding is made difficult by the volatility of each researcher’s theoretical biases (see, for a similar statement, Tallerman & Gibson 2012: 15–26). Some pluralist positions underscore the necessity of telling apart the external and the internal concept of language, granting existence to both their referents and relating them with different kinds of evolutionary dynamics This position was defended, for example, by Balari & Lorenzo (2013: Chapter 1) for methodological reasons—but discarded afterwards (Balari & Lorenzo 2015a), as well as in Bickerton (2014: Chapter 9), whose diagnostic of the overall situation is summed up in the following passage, which focuses on the particular case of syntax: In retrospect it seems bizarre that nobody, throughout this debate, proposed a principled and systematic distinction between those parts of syntax that were biologically given and those that had to be acquired through acculturation into one of the many thousands of speech communities.
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