Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater, Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Pp. xiv + 330.

Abstract

An extraterrestrial looking down on us may or may not be struck by the (apparent) uniformity of human languages (Chomsky 2000), but they would likely notice that, by some measures, there is greater diversity among THEORIES of language than there is among languages. It may not take long for them to discover the cause of this. We are grappling with a ‘hard problem’ in language science: on the one hand, linguistic structures afford multiple descriptions, formalizations, etc.; on the other, whatever formalism one adopts, it is difficult to see how such structures could have emerged gradually as the result of processes of evolution, historical change, acquisition, and neural computation. Over almost three decades of joint work, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater (C&C) have developed an original and productive approach to this ‘hard problem’, synthesized in a recent book, Creating Language, published by the MIT Press. This book occupies a unique position in the vast and diverse landscape of theories of human language. It is not only one of the very few proposals that aim to explicitly reconcile accounts of linguistic structure and process: it is also serving as an ‘aggregator’ of theoretical views and empirical results that have originated in different communities (cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, AI, etc.) in response to mainstream generative linguistics and that have remained scattered or in search of a unifying framework for many years. Creating Language is mandatory reading for anyone interested in understanding ongoing tectonic shifts in language science. The book’s core idea is presented in Chapter 1. Human language is ‘created’ across multiple time scales: biological evolution fixes the ‘hard priors’ (i.e. the brain) that then shape, during cultural transmission, acquisition, and processing, the linguistic structures that emerge, and eventually stabilize, in communities of language users. Chapter 1 also states the philosophy and methodology of C&C’s book: questions of processing, acquisition, and evolution should be addressed jointly (e.g. acquiring a language is learning to process that language), and theories of linguistic structures should take into account various processing constraints (more on this later). Thus, language science is primarily driven by experimental