The Amazing Power Of The Conversation Machine

Do linguist need to get away from the library and spend more time talking? Ever since Noam Chomsky revolutionised linguistics in the 1950s, research has focused on the structures underlying grammatically correct sentences and on our astonishing ability to both generate and understand an infinity of expressions.Now two new books separately argue that the to and fro of conversation is key to understanding language. If they are right, the idea of language as acomputational system needs to  make some room for that of language as a tool for cooperative communication.

Daniel Everett of Bentley University, Massachusetts, and Nick Enfield at the University of Sydney start from different places. Everett’s wide-ranging How Language Began is rooted in his 30 years working with tribal groups in the Amazon as an anthropologist. Enfield’s How We Talk comes out of the lab and speeds through extraordinary experiments on the fast-paced, interactive flow of conversation. Everett has already had a famous debate with Chomsky and his colleagues, related in Everett’s bestseller Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes. He set out as a missionary to live with the Pirahã, a group of Amazonian hunter-gatherers, aiming to learn their language and translate the New Testament into it. Instead, his encounter with this happy culture,which values “immediacy of experience”over unsubstantiated tales, led him to lose his faith and to discover that their language was unlike anything studied before.

Pirahã appears not to use recursion, theway inwhich other languages tuck phrases inside other phrases to build more complex sentences. That seemed to challenge core ideas about language and sparked a huge controversy. Now it is more accepted that languages can be expressive without necessarily using recursive forms.

To read more please click the frame above.