Syntactical or Tactical: Innateness vs. Rules in Generative Grammar

While I was reading Carnie’s article on syntax, the most profound thought that kept intruding was the memory of another study (by Mark Forsyth) that I had just read, which stated that noun modifiers in the English language are ordered opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose Noun, i.e. “you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife,” but it would sound strange or foreign if one were to rearrange the order of those adjectives. The quote was advertised as “Things native English speakers know, but don’t know we know.” This is in line with Carnie’s description of Universal Grammar, the idea that the ability to produce and understand Language is an innate, inherent part of the human brain. Apparently, Forsyth defends his claim by relating an anecdote where a young JRR Tolkien wrote a story about a “green great dragon,” and was told by his mother that he would have to have a “great green dragon” instead, essentially showcasing Carnie’s Grammaticality Judgment Task in everyday conversation (as well as some prescriptive grammar, apparently) by showing a native speaker denounce a grammatically incorrect phrase.

Carnie goes on to establish the evidence for “biological arguments in favor of U[niversal] G[rammar]” (Carnie 21) observe that “Language seems to be both human-specific and pervasive across the species” (Carnie 21). I read a science fiction book called The Silent History maybe a year and a half ago, and in it members of the new generation were being born without Language (or i-Language), unable to comprehend or produce words or sound waves and yet still capable of somehow thinking and processing the world, even communicating with one another. Called Silents, these children were, it turned out, the victims of some kind of disease or virus that denied them the use of the “certain parts of the brain… linked to specific linguistic functions” (Carnie 21). The authors questioned the essentiality of language to human nature, contradicting our own theories of the formation of thought. As someone whose entire life – my education, my entertainment, my relationships – is steeped in words, I cannot mentally grapple with the idea, so I suppose I would be on Carnie’s side regarding Universal Grammar.

I found Carnie’s section on “morphological distribution” (Carnie 38) interesting, because it coincided so closely with my own observations while learning other languages. Carnie mentioned the problem of language variation across the world earlier in the reading, but I find that languages, however different, have some sort of equivalent for these kinds of affixes. For example, the derivational morpheme –ing in English establishes that the word is a verb, that someone is in the act of doing something, and there’s a suffix that serves the same purpose in Spanish: -iendo or –ando, depending on the ending of the infinitive verb. My main question about this is why, despite the similarities of human languages, does our innate Language only apply to one or two languages, those on which we’ve been raised? Why can’t we learn and have the grammatical instincts every other language on the planet once we’ve been introduced to it?