Over at Babel's Dawn Edmund Blair Bolles has started blogging on the 2010 Evolution of Language Conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
- his first critical discussion of Maggie Tallerman's talk defending the sense of a partly-language-specific innate 'language faculty' can be found here.
In her talk, Tallerman mentioned that some of Chomsky's recent ideas on 'third factor principles,' physical laws, and general cognitive principles playing a part in constituting language are actually quite similar to people who criticize generativism.
I had the same impression after attending a talk Noam Chomsky gave a few weeks ago in Mainz, Germany. In the Q&A section there he even spoke of the importance of social factors like 'Theory of Mind' in the evolution or rather the evolutionary transmission of language once the cognitive property of 'merge' had been externalized linguistically.
I'm really interested in what the other people at the conference will say about Tallerman's talk so I'll stay tuned.
Update:
Bolles' other posts on the conference, which are based on the slides the presenters sent to him in advance, can be found here:
- Terrence Deacon's talk- Peter Gardenförs' talk
- Stephen Anderson's talk
- Morten Christiansen' talk
