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Researchers traced word rules across more than 3,000 languages.<\/p>
Researchers traced word rules across more than 3,000 languages.<\/p>
What’s the News: <\/strong>Noam Chomsky<\/a>, look out: If language has any universal grammar<\/a>, it’s hiding really well, conclude the authors of a recent Nature<\/em> study<\/a>. The idea that all human languages share some underlying structure, regardless of where or when they evolved, an influential idea that nonetheless has drawn some<\/a> controversy<\/a> since Chomsky popularized it in the 1950s. One part of natural-grammar theory is the idea that certain word order rules (whether the verb or the noun goes first and whether a preposition goes before or after a noun, for example) will always associate together, regardless of which language they occur in.<\/p> But when cognitive scientists and a biologist teamed up to see whether there were shared patterns in word order across four large language families, they found almost none. A common cultural background, they found, was the best predictor for how a language orders words.<\/p> <\/strong><\/p> How the Heck: <\/strong><\/p> Applying biology techniques to linguistics, the team built an evolutionary tree of word order. They treated word order as a trait, just as biologists might treat eye color or hair color. Researchers traced word rules across more than 3,000 languages.What’s the News: Noam Chomsky, look out: If language has any universal grammar, it’s hiding really well, conclude the authors of a recent Nature study. The idea that all human languages share … Continue reading
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