Book Review: The Language Game, by Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater
A book for linguistics nerds.
Basic Books, 2022, 304 pages
Forget the language instinct - this is the story of how we make up language as we go.
Language is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing capacity - and one that remains poorly understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater show us where generations of scientists seeking the rules of language got it wrong. Language isn’t about hardwired grammars but about near-total freedom, something like a game of charades, with the only requirement being a desire to understand and be understood. From this new vantage point, Christiansen and Chater find compelling solutions to major mysteries like the origins of languages and how language learning is possible, and to long-running debates such as whether having two words for “blue” changes what we see. In the end, they show that the only real constraint on communication is our imagination.
As a one-time linguist, I'm always interested in books about language. The Language Game is the latest attempt to address the question of how and why humans became language users. Where did language come from - is it just a natural byproduct of intelligence, or is there something special about humans besides our intelligence? After all, animals can (to a very limited extent) learn language, and they even communicate amongst themselves non-linguistically. Why are there so many languages, and why are some of them so very alien to one another? Why can some languages be learned more easily than others, and why are children little language-absorbing sponges who acquire language so much faster than adults, even though their brains are far less developed?
The basic premise of The Language Game is that language evolution and acquisition is a process of improvisation, a kind of advanced game of charades in which the participants construct meaning interactively. This is in contrast to the two major linguistic theorists of today, Noam Chomsky and Stephen Pinker. Chomsky, famous for his "transformational grammar," argues that every language has a "deep structure" of generative rules which infants acquire intuitively and adult learners try to learn explicitly. Stephen Pinker, on the other hand, argues that language is a product of evolution: according to this theory, there is a "universal grammar" that is literally biological in nature, and all languages are the products of linguistic structures hardwired into our brains.
Christiansen and Chater claim that instead, humans construct meaning by signaling to each other using words and gestures and other communicative tools until understanding is conveyed, and over time, these various signals are regularized into a mutually comprehensible language. He begins with various crude illustrations of this idea, the development of pidgin dialects, or the early efforts of Captain Cook to communicate with Pacific islanders, and similar encounters between people from cultures with no language or history in common.
The idea of language as a game of charades is interesting, though I can't really say if Christiansen and Chater have a stronger argument than Chomsky and Pinker. The authors talk a lot about the differences between human and animal communication, comparing the ability of animals to learn the meaning of some words, birds that imitate human speech, and great apes that can learn sign language. As the book points out, even the most impressive examples of animal communication come nowhere near the expressiveness or sophistication of humans; animals cannot talk about the past or speculate about the future, they cannot construct descriptions of unfamiliar objects or concepts, they are not capable of metaphor or poetry or puns or even conditional statements.
I didn't think there was a lot new here, but I've read lots of books about language. If you already know about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the Indo-European language family tree and non-Indo European languages, or you've heard "Eskimos have a hundred words for snow" debunked repeatedly, then a lot of the padding in this book will be old material, but it's still interesting to see what linguists are still trying to figure out, after decades of Chomskyan grammar.
My complete list of book reviews.
Basic Books, 2022, 304 pages
Forget the language instinct - this is the story of how we make up language as we go.
Language is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing capacity - and one that remains poorly understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater show us where generations of scientists seeking the rules of language got it wrong. Language isn’t about hardwired grammars but about near-total freedom, something like a game of charades, with the only requirement being a desire to understand and be understood. From this new vantage point, Christiansen and Chater find compelling solutions to major mysteries like the origins of languages and how language learning is possible, and to long-running debates such as whether having two words for “blue” changes what we see. In the end, they show that the only real constraint on communication is our imagination.
As a one-time linguist, I'm always interested in books about language. The Language Game is the latest attempt to address the question of how and why humans became language users. Where did language come from - is it just a natural byproduct of intelligence, or is there something special about humans besides our intelligence? After all, animals can (to a very limited extent) learn language, and they even communicate amongst themselves non-linguistically. Why are there so many languages, and why are some of them so very alien to one another? Why can some languages be learned more easily than others, and why are children little language-absorbing sponges who acquire language so much faster than adults, even though their brains are far less developed?
The basic premise of The Language Game is that language evolution and acquisition is a process of improvisation, a kind of advanced game of charades in which the participants construct meaning interactively. This is in contrast to the two major linguistic theorists of today, Noam Chomsky and Stephen Pinker. Chomsky, famous for his "transformational grammar," argues that every language has a "deep structure" of generative rules which infants acquire intuitively and adult learners try to learn explicitly. Stephen Pinker, on the other hand, argues that language is a product of evolution: according to this theory, there is a "universal grammar" that is literally biological in nature, and all languages are the products of linguistic structures hardwired into our brains.
Christiansen and Chater claim that instead, humans construct meaning by signaling to each other using words and gestures and other communicative tools until understanding is conveyed, and over time, these various signals are regularized into a mutually comprehensible language. He begins with various crude illustrations of this idea, the development of pidgin dialects, or the early efforts of Captain Cook to communicate with Pacific islanders, and similar encounters between people from cultures with no language or history in common.
The idea of language as a game of charades is interesting, though I can't really say if Christiansen and Chater have a stronger argument than Chomsky and Pinker. The authors talk a lot about the differences between human and animal communication, comparing the ability of animals to learn the meaning of some words, birds that imitate human speech, and great apes that can learn sign language. As the book points out, even the most impressive examples of animal communication come nowhere near the expressiveness or sophistication of humans; animals cannot talk about the past or speculate about the future, they cannot construct descriptions of unfamiliar objects or concepts, they are not capable of metaphor or poetry or puns or even conditional statements.
I didn't think there was a lot new here, but I've read lots of books about language. If you already know about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the Indo-European language family tree and non-Indo European languages, or you've heard "Eskimos have a hundred words for snow" debunked repeatedly, then a lot of the padding in this book will be old material, but it's still interesting to see what linguists are still trying to figure out, after decades of Chomskyan grammar.
My complete list of book reviews.