Language: UG or Not to Be, That Is the Question

Lieberman’s commentary [1] nicely illustrates our original argument [2] that analysis of language evolution is complicated by a lack of agreement about the concepts of both “language” and “evolution.” Here we address each in turn. First, Lieberman argues against the existence of a language faculty in the sense in which we defined it: a domain- and species-specific computational cognitive system that can generate arbitrarily complex hierarchical syntactic structure. In contrast, Lieberman defines language functionally, as a means of “communication,” with human speech as a “key attribute.” However, as we originally argued [2], while externalized language may be used for communication, the two cannot be equated. Language is a computational operation occurring in the mind of an individual, independent of its possible communicative use, while speech is one possible externalization of language (among others such as sign) and is not an essential aspect of it. Lieberman’s arguments are a prime example of fallaciously confounding the function(s) of a trait with its mechanism [3,4]