> The article:
> http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20021122.pdf
Oh, THAT article! Yikes, I never read it as a recantation.
It's certainly _worth_ a read, if you can overlook the bizarre illustrations with which the new _Science_ magazine has adorned it.
Chomsky & Co. lay out a number of distinctions and possibilities. Suggestions are made -- with a straight face, but rather puckishly, I suspect -- about what bits of information we would need to have in order to form any idea about the evolution of language. Over to you, palaeontologists, neurologists, DNA sequencers. Drop us a line when you've got something useful.
The idea that this represents some sort of volte-face on Chomsky's part seems odd to me. People call him an "idealist", but he has always made it pretty clear that he thinks language competence has a physical basis in the brain -- some structure or group of structures which must, obviously, have evolved. (Whether they evolved *for* language is another question, and not at all an easy one to answer.)
In principle this evolution is subject to study, but there's a lot we would need to know, and don't. The 2002 paper mentions a few of these problematic items, with an owlish solemnity wonderful to behold.
As for the New Yorker piece -- a gossipy feuilleton on the supposedly earth-shaking Piraha folk, depending for its facts entirely on the entrepreneurial Mr Everett, owner of the Piraha franchise -- it's a little surprising to see the New Yorker cited as an authority in a conversation like this. If it were Hegel we were talking about, or C Wright Mills, would a New Yorker item carry much weight, except for purposes of entertainment?
Thanks to Shag for the page references to Kinneally, which I recommend without reservation to anybody who's still following this thread. They are all Kinneally's characterizations, without inverted commas. Following her endnote references may or may not convince you that her characterizations are accurate.
I wasn't convinced. Of course, I'm approaching the matter with views formed over the course of several decades, and perhaps they're rather sclerotic.
But for what it's worth, I came away thinking Kinneally was a cheap and tendentious popularizer. What original research has she done? What "field work"? What languages does she know other than Australian English? What new theoretical postulates -- capable of being tested -- has she proposed?
None that I can see. She's got a pleasing breezy prose style and she's recycled some material from the likes of Stephen Pinker and told some charming anecdotes about the undoubted cleverness of dolphins. And most important, she's telling us what we want to hear, if the popularity of people like Dawkins and Pinker is any indication.
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org