Chomsky’s
Innate Black Box is secular creationism
Daniel Everett takes a strong stand
against the innate theory of Chomsky that language is nothing but, and he
insists on that nothing but, a universal grammar in an innate black box in
man's brain installed there by a genetic mutation. Language is for Chomsky the
product of that grammar-gene.
Of course, it is unreasonable. Communication is the word. It started long before Hominins but the first really bipedal upright Hominin, Homo Erectus, who was also the first migrating Hominin had to have developed a high level of communication. That's Everett's main point.
I would just add that the communicational situation in which Hominins found themselves provided them with the matrix of our linguistic syntax. That's my argument that only amplifies Everett's argument.
Languages and Linguistics, Phylogeny/phylogenetics, Origin of Language, Phylogeny, Hominin evolution, Homo Erectus et Homo Sapiens
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