Why do linguists like Chomsky assume that grammar is a completely radical break from animal brain functioning? I think it is mainly because of a deeply rooted assumption in Western religion and much (but not all) of Western philosophy that human beings have free, moral, non-material souls that animals lack.
Chomsky's reasoning is that the arbitrary complexity (recursive structure) of human language implies some sort of low level computational engine to do the relevant computations. I don't have an opinion either way. We can see that LSTMs can emulate this kind of logic, but they also make mistakes. Also, I'm not sure that human reasoning is as logical as it might seem. E.g. I read somewhere (lost the reference) that the earliest languages may have lacked the ability to arbitrarily nest clauses. So maybe humans only emulate logical thinking.
We can see that LSTMs can emulate this kind of logic, but they also make mistakes.
Humans can also make mistakes when processing language. We're still better than LSTM's, but I'm not sure we can claim a qualitative difference.
Furthermore, even though we can process sentences with very deep embedding like "The rat the cat the dog bit chased escaped", my intuition is that we are not using our normal language processing systems for that. When I read that sentence, I just fail to process it and then I invoke my logic systems to try to determine the structure and decode it, in a way that feels totally different from processing a normal sentence (I'm not understanding it in real time, in a natural way, but rather solving a small puzzle). So I personally don't find the Chomskyan arguments based on that kind of corner cases very convincing.
That is indeed a contrived example of recursion, but recursion (in the sense of embedding) can be much simpler and easier to parse. For example:
"John, my friend from high school, who married your cousin, Mary, is coming over for dinner".
This sort of embedding is what makes human language infinite in scope- you can keep embedding sub-sentences for ever, and so you can produce new utterances forever.
This ability to infinitely extend and recombine the meaning of utterances is what gives human language its expressive power, and what is absent from animal languages, so far as we know.
Examples like that are parsable because they are similar to what we would call, in programming, tail recursion (i.e., recursion that doesn't really need recursion). It's true that you can embed an infinite number of subsentences ("John, my friend from high school, who married your cousin, Mary, who had an affair with the bartender, Jack, who hated his sister, Lisa, who was a fan of Lady Gaga, is coming over for dinner") but you only need two "stack frames", one to remember John and the other for the rest.
The middle part is basically equivalent to saying "Mary had an affair with the bartender, Jack. Jack hated his sister, Lisa. Lisa was a fan of Lady Gaga". My intuition is that it's parsed basically as separate sentences. Once you finish one of them you can just forget it, you only need to remember John (as there is more information about him in the end). Sentences where you need to remember more elements (i.e., you actually need unbounded recursion) become unparsable in real time as my previous example.
Of course, I don't have scientific evidence to back the things I'm saying, it's just intuition, but the same can be said of the Chomskyan theories.
I think this notion of "materiality" is an ancient chain letter that we can discard, or at least leave aside as we consider alternatives that can still support the notional 'self' & individual 'soul' without requiring a dualistic reality.
What the ancients understood as "matter" we can consider as 'localized coherence' (membranes, knots, vortices, etc.), and the "spirit" as fields, in a non-dualistic universe.
So speaking of Western religions, reconsider the meaning of the thought that "the kingdom is in you", and in the spirit of a holistic human metaphysics, note that whether in the "East" or in the "West", the key to transcendence appears to be shedding the illusion of the centrality of the localized "body" as the totality of the self.
What annoys me about linguistics is that higher level languages are quite poor for basic human communication. Non verbal communication is maybe the most important channel.
Actually human languages are much better suited for all kinds of communication :
To the best of our knowledge, most animal systems of communication don't allow reference to either the speaker (i.e "I"), the hearer (i.e "you"), or a distant third party (i.e "it"). Even elaborate systems like the bee dance are highly specialized in the type of reference that is possible.
In human speech it is possible to talk about things or people that are not here, things that don't exist but may, things that have existed, things that will exist, things that won't exist. Hypotheses, conjectures, and so on, are not part of any other species way of communicating, as far as I know.
Furthermore, all known human languages allow you to attribute utterances to another, earlier speaker, what is known as reported speech (often, though not always as Pirahâ demonstrate, through an embedded clause "He said that X").
Human non-verbal communication (which is EMPHATICALLY NOT to be confused with sign languages), on the other hand, is typically not very expressive. Apart from the admittedly very important, but nevertheless quite specialized domain of human emotion (conveyed by facial expression for instance), it is more or less inadequate for much of what we want to communicate.
I agree, yet non-verbal is extremely important for in-situ, in the now, personal and interpersonal well being. N-Verbal can even make Verbal communication moot since one can say anything depending on its emotional state. Also, some things are extremely hard to describe by words yet can be conveyed with a silence, a look in the eye, a gesture.
I really agree about the abstract possibilities of speech, but I a bit annoyed at the fact in one's existence, the non verbal cues are so important, yet so often boldly ignored, and almost never taught.
You know who definitely agrees with you ? Linguists who specialize in conversational analysis, multimodal discourse analysis and interactional sociolinguistics.
It makes me kind of sad when people assume that "Chomsky's work = the whole of linguistics".
It clearly can't be. The genetic SNP delta between humans and other primates is too small to record sufficiently complex cortical changes for something like all of neural symbolic representations.
Even simple cellular automata can produce drastically different behavior given slight tweaks to simple rules, so I don't think that a small genetic delta rules out a large structural change.
