I found the idea of an innate Universal Grammar a pipe dream. Carnie’s proof that language is - at least partly - innate hinges on the premise that ‘Rule governed infinite systems are unlearnable’, and here he draws the analogy to our matching of sentences to the environment that surrounds them. This analogy is questionable for two reasons: firstly, it seems to me ludicrous that every sentence matches only one situation. Perhaps a sentence like ‘the cat spots the kissing fishes’ is sufficiently specific to only apply to a very specific set of circumstances, but the vast majority of language - whether spoken or written - uses far vaguer sentences, and sentences that can be applied to a plethora of different situations. More importantly, however, I reject that learning a system involves understanding how it applies to every situation to which it could apply. I’d contend that to learn a system, all you need to learn are the rules which you must apply to whichever situations you come across, and trust that your inferential sensibilities are enough to carry you from there. The set of rules for any particular grammars is quite certainly finite, and it seems to me quite obvious that someone has to learn these rules. Given that this premise seems invalid, the argument for an innate sense of grammar seems dubious. In fact, in the following chapters, Carnie details how sentence structure can be represented to trees or brackets and it seems to me that if we understand how such structures are constructed, we can quite easily learn new sentence structures.
Another common theme running through the justification for a feeling of grammar is the niggling feeling of ‘wrongness’ one feels when one hears an error in grammar but is unable to explicate quite why such usage is incorrect. Empirically, this makes sense: I too have felt this sudden prick of doubt as to why I just knew that something was wrong, but this was hardly because I had developed, of my own accord, an idea of what was ‘right’ that just happened to align with those of other native speakers of English. We develop this sense of rightness and wrongness of grammar through example: teachers, parents, condescending older siblings and cocky friends. We learn through mistake, through identifying over long periods of dialogue precisely how people speak and in doing so, building up a system of rules we use to produce our own vocalisation.
All the evidence Carnie presented in the chapters seemed to prove only one thing to me: that humans are capable of understanding how languages work. That seemed obvious to me, and I fail to see how we can conclude that we need an innate sense of language to communicate, to comprehend, or for that matter, to study linguistics.
I completely agree and actually had the same reaction regarding the book's take on Chomsky and universal grammar, although my reasoning had less to do with common sense about child language acquisition and more to do with how radically diverse the world's languages are. For example, some Amazonian languages do not even embody the recursion function in the sense that Chomsky described it. I briefly researched this topic and found that recently linguists have actually developed a new theory replacing universal grammar called usage-based linguistics. This theory suggests that children learn language through pattern recognition as opposed to application of innate knowledge and points out that many of the areas of the brain responsible for producing language originally existed for other purposes. In any case, I certainly didn't appreciate that the book only presented one theory, when the topic is clearly debatable.
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