The Recursive Mind

Not sure if “universal grammar is dead”. But I think it is time to explore its links, beyond linguistics and psychology, in the areas of planning and problem solving. Planning and problem solving, related as well to scene perception, understanding and description, and events memorization, seems to have an even higher level of universality as they are required in any intelligent system biologic or artificial, terrestrial or not.
I’d suggest that the unspecified elements of the I-language can be mapped both to the elements and events of the scene as well as to the nouns and verbal elements of a language. The common principles within I-language could thus be identified in the planning and problem solving causational logic and they could accommodate indeed a large variety of socially agreed E-language structures.
From the planning perspective, E-language innovation can be seen as mandatory for solving critical challenges of human groups existence. While I-language could be used by an individual to draft personal and group plans, the E-language social agreements are required to describe the scene, communicate the plan and coordinate its implementation.

I think it would be very interesting to experiment and see how modern humans not sharing a common language would collaborate to overcome challenges beyond the ability of one individual. Such a group of modern humans might have to agree quickly on leadership, roles, names and basic communication and language elements in order to prepare and execute a common plan. If such experiment might sound too expensive, it might be more educational or even lucrative to organize it as a TV show. I would speculate that new perspectives might emerge on language origin, religion, politics and education. If such groups will have to compete the level of efficiencies built into their E-languages would play a critical role and this might act as an incentive for groups with a weaker, less efficient E-language to adopt a more refined one.

Maybe it’s not I-language itself that’s the problem so much as Chomsky’s description of it. According to Chomsky, I-language (or universal grammar) has no external reference, and therefore cannot have evolved through natural selection. Chomsky suggests that it emerged in a single step in a single individual, probably within the past 100,000 years, and may have been due to a fortuitous mutation. This has been called the “big bang” theory of language evolution, and is not too dissimilar from the idea that language was a gift from God.

This view makes little evolutionary sense. As the commentator suggests, though, we can broaden the notion of I-language — if we still want to call it that — to be compatible with an evolutionary account, and to make reference to real-world events. I have argued elsewhere that the universal properties of language may derive from non-linguistic capacities, including theory of mind and mental time travel (Corballis, 2009). Higher-order theory of mind is a pre-requisite to sharing experience with others, and much of our experience consists of memories of the past, plans for the future, and episodes that are purely imagined. An important feature of language is displacement—the ability to refer to objects and events that are not physically present. The universality, then, lies not in grammar, but rather in our ways of understanding the world and other people.

E-languages may well be mandatory for solving critical problems of human group existence, although nonhuman primates can achieve some level of group problem solving, as demonstrated by the work of the primatologist Frans de Waal. People who speak different languages can quite quickly improvise ways of communicating, typically through the use of manual gesture — and indeed I think that language itself evolved from gesture, but that’s another story. I like the commentator’s idea of extending research on cooperation between those who speak different languages.

Nevertheless individual languages seem to have evolved as much to
exclude as to share, which is perhaps why there are so many. The 6000 or so languages in the world enable communication and cooperation within groups, but serve also to exclude outsiders. In that sense, language is a secret code; in World War II, the US military used Navajo speakers to communicate plans openly via walkie-talkie, in the secure knowledge that the Japanese would not understand anything that was said. The sheer impenetrability of foreign languages is, of course, a further argument against universal grammar.

Reference
Corballis, M.C. (2009). The evolution of language. Proceedings of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1156, 19-43.

About half century ago Miller, Galanter and Pribram wrote in their book “Plans and the structure of behavior” that they “have every reason to believe that man’s verbal abilities are very intimately related to his planning abilities.”

My suggestion would be to build an analogy between language and grammar on one side and planning and problem solving on the other side.
Then, instead of asking "why language has the properties it has?" we should explore "why planning has the properties it has?".
I'd be very interested in the concepts for which no correspondence can be built. What functions would they have?
This research should support the idea of language as a tool for dynamic planning. (I'd guess that non dynamic planning in biologic systems would mean innate planning, which should be easier to prove as less effective than dynamic planning)

A first observation is that the plans are always structured as a list of “planning sentences” usually referred as tasks. Such a “planning sentence” consists usually of one resource identified uniquely, in a certain way, and an activity with a number of associated details like duration, cost, predecessor, successor, etc.
For the analogy mentioned above, the resources are perfect correspondents for nouns and activities/transformations are perfect correspondents for verbs. Tenses would support predecessor/successor relations, etc. (If Chinese has no tenses it should have some other structures to reflect predecessor/successor relations; without them no working plans could be built in Chinese)

Another observation would be that a plan could be executed successfully disregarding the order of the parts in a planning sentence as long as the semantic of each part is understood, but adopting an arbitrary order of the parts in each sentence will greatly improve the efficiency of communicating the plan within a group of individuals used to that specific order. Such a mechanism could depict how an internal planning language with a universal structure could support a large variety of E-languages based on different social agreements.

Why plans have such structures? My guess is that planning structures are dictated by the logic of causality and since causality is expected everywhere in Universe I'd suggest we could consider planning structures as universal.

From this perspective I think that some form of internal planning language was needed in early humans before developing gestures for communication.

There are a few other ideas around the language/planning analogy and the most promising one I see would be to explain the Link Grammar of Temperley, Sleator and Lafferty and the results of bayesian inference in multiple languages. I'd expect such an explanation to reveal the concept structure of the internal planning language (as a form of I-language, I guess).

I'd love to read The evolution of language as well as The recursive mind when released later this year. I would be interested how you envision the mechanisms of browsing the memory for the mental time travel. I'd expect there some connection to Link Grammar.