Word Order and Noam Chomsky

[untermensche]

We learn by observation, mimic, and trial and error through our genetic based capacities.

What is new and what is controversial is Chomsky's contention that a capacity specific for the understanding and production of language exists.

This causes all human languages to be similar.

They all share certain features.

They are not just something humans come up with.

Language is something humans are built to come up with. And the languages they come up with are all similar because it is a genetic mechanism that allows for their creation.

Spanish and English are very different in form.

Only on the surface. When you look at the languages hierarchically they are similar in form.

Language evolves.

That is a loose use of the word "evolve".

Languages change in terms of labels and concepts, but they do not change in terms of word order necessary for understanding.

The labels, the specific words are so different between languages and a person uses the labels for understanding, without knowledge of the labels there is no understanding and word order is not even comprehended so the other language seems incredibly different.

When it is very similar.

 

[Speakpigeon]

To explain why languages that developed in isolation from one another are so similar requires invoking an underlying language capacity.

I don't thinks so. The explanation seems rather that all human beings developing a language using their voice have to comply with a large set of constraints. The varieties of human languages throughout the world may just about cover the range of what it is practical to achieve given those constraints. Do we know of any artificial language humans could learn and use to communicate that would be way out of the existing range of human languages?

A capacity that allows the creation of similar expressions of language.

I don't buy that. We would need specific examples of that and be certain that no communication could have existed between the populations concerned. Which seems a very tall order to me.

Like building a similar nest requires an underlying nest building capacity.

Wrong supporting example. Nests are not specific to birds:

Nest
A nest is a structure built by certain animals to hold eggs, offspring, and, occasionally, the animal itself. Although nests are most closely associated with birds, members of all classes of vertebrates and some invertebrates construct nests

The bit in italic supports my point. Different species, very different species, get to build similar structures just because they have some neurons and have to comply with broadly the same physical contraints.

So, you'd have to try harder to be convincing.

Gorillas and chimps couldn't be made to play football or chess. Do you think that this shows that human beings have two very specific capacities, one to play football and one to play chess?

My position is the ability for two people to play chess only exists because of the language capacity.

If some organism cannot learn a language, if it is not human, it cannot play chess.

Chomsky's position is mathematics exists because of the language capacity.

So, it's no longer a specific language capacity. Why then call it a language capacity and not a football capacity or a chess capacity?

Sure, but we seem to have many skills that develop this way.

Yes, like walking.

There must be a walking capacity to allow a human to walk.

A walking capacity is an incredibly complicated capacity. The cerebellum that has fine control over movement is incredibly complex.

There must be a visual capacity to allow a human to see. Again a very complicated capacity. Most of the cerebrum is devoted to this capacity.

???

Sorry, I fail to see the relevance of that to what I said. So, let me repeat the question:

Language is something that just naturally develops without struggle, if there is exposure.

If there is exposure to two languages they will both grow in the individual.

Sure, but we seem to have many skills that develop this way. You would need to find some other reason, one that would be specific to language. We have eyes and ears because the perception of images and sounds are both very specific and could not be both processed by the same organ. It's not clear to me that language would need a specific process, appart from our general mental capabilities.

Why would language need a specific capability? Why wouldn't our general mental capabilities be enough to do the job?

And there must be a capacity to allow the complexity of language.

That's what you haven't explained. It seems to me that our general mental capabilities may be up to the job.

Ultimately in the absence of language the idea of cognition is difficult to understand.

It depends. Perception and intuition don't seem to me to require language. Elaborate reasoning certainly requires language but the behaviour of other animals seems evidence language is not necessary for basic reasoning, which may or may not be just intuition.

Elaborate reasoning may be something that developed over a long period of time. This may have been done using either a specific language capability or a general capability.

1. (Psychology) the mental act or process by which knowledge is acquired, including perception, intuition, and reasoning

There are the spatial capacities, the ability to deal with objects in space, either seen or imagined.

But the language capacity may be the capacity that allows advanced cognition beyond a chimp.

It probably is that the language capacity allows for advanced cognitive capacities as opposed to advanced cognitive capacities creating a language capacity.

That's also something you haven't justified.

So if this first individual with a language capacity survived and prospered because of it without using it for language it wouldn't be a capacity specific to language.

Definitely.

Chomsky thinks it really is a thinking capacity. A capacity that allows for better thinking. Due to it's nature that allows for better thinking and the nature of pre-humans that were already using sound for communication it was able to be utilized as a language capacity. Soon those with it could communicate to a degree with language. The labels and concepts would be limited at first. This was a great advantage and a way to easily spot a person without the capacity. This is how those with the capacity came to completely eliminate those without it. Like humans wiped out the Neanderthal.

The thinking capacity that allows for language is likely the mathematical capacity as well.

The musical capacity as well.

It is a general capacity that can be used for a few things.

But it is called the language capacity when discussing language. It is probably the same capacity used when a person solves a mathematical problem.

So it is a general mental capacity.

There's no good reason to call that a "language capacity" like you do, and it's definitely not a good reason that people like Chomsky should call it so without any good reason. It just creates confusion.
EB

 

[steve_bank]

Not quite, we evolved we were not proactively built for speech. We know speech and language reside in specific areas of the brain. But for a few genes chimps might have language. Language exists in many forms among animals. Sounds for things. Researchers belive dolpins have specific calls, names, for each other in a pod. Parrots are intelligent, they can learn a vocabulary and apply words in new situations. Chimps taught sign language and apply it to new situations, they paas it on to young.

You have the old 1950's paradigm as humans being unique. Language, tools, and opposing thumb and fingers was the cliché.

We are not unique, we are better at language and tools.

Still nothing new. Chomsky's shtick is inventing out of the ordinary to seem extraordinary, and that is not unique. People pick from existing research and present as something new.

An anthropologist traveling in Nicaragua discovered a group of deaf kids who created a unique fully functional sign language. It evolved into a complete language passed on the young.. It evolved over generations,.

It is known that the capacity to learn language by immersion alone begins to diminish in teen years. As we get older and begin to mature the brain changes and goes through a sort of cleanup process. You must be isolated intellectually. Language has evolved over the last 50 years in a big way.

Metaphors have changed and evolved.

 

[steve_bank]

Spanish and English are not similar an form. I picked up some Spanish from CDs over the last year and I am innersed in Spanish in the facility I live in.

In Spanish using pronouns and word order are not strict. It is why nonfluent Hispanics may sound odd speaking English, they can at times fit English words into Spanish syntax. That was the first thing I realized.

Go online or get CDs, you may find it rewarding.

 

[skepticalbip]

.....snip......

It is known that the capacity to learn language by immersion alone begins to diminish in teen years. As we get older and begin to mature the brain changes and goes through a sort of cleanup process.

........snip...........

.

Not only do we lose the capacity to learn language by immersion with time, we lose the capacity to learn language by concerted training efforts if the subject is isolated from social contact into their later years. At least that is what the work with feral children means if we can believe the studies. If these children were found at an early enough age they could be taught some language skills but if they were found at an older age then all attempts failed.

 

[Copernicus]

To understand Chomsky's theory of language, one has to understand its basic underpinning--an intuitive ability to recognize well-formedness. Early in his career, Chomsky distinguished the ability to make such judgments from the ability to actually produce or understand language. He called the former "linguistic competence" and the latter "linguistic performance". Hence, when one talks about the "language capacity", it means something relatively narrow and special for Chomsky, but not necessarily in discussions by other scholars and members of discussion forums on the internet. Chomsky's views since the 60s have evolved, but it is really unclear whether he has undergone any fundamental shift in his thinking on this issue.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to Chomsky's compartmentalization of the "language capacity". The main advantage for linguists is that they feel they don't have to get a degree in psychology to do linguistics. They can go into the field and just ask people about their intuitive acceptance of well-formed constructions in their language. They also do not need to worry about what causes people to use the expressions they do in running discourse, what words they choose to express themselves, or how they come to comprehend running speech. Linguists explain all of the different ways a sentence can be ambiguous, but they don't have to say anything about how speakers and listeners actually get a single, coherent meaning from it in discourse. All of those (and more) are interesting topics for psychologists, especially "psycholinguists", to study. Ordinary working grammarians don't have to dirty their hands with explanations of messy linguistic behavior. They can just focus on the ideal structure of a linguistic system. IOW, they can describe grammars as formal systems with their own self-contained internal structure.

The main disadvantage is that linguistics now becomes a sort of bastardized theory of psychology that is ultimately supposed to make sense to behavioral psychologists who actually study linguistic behavior, as opposed to well-formedness judgments. After all, we do strive to produce well-formed language structures, so what is the role of the "grammar" in actual behavior? Linguistics becomes a specialized branch of psychology embedded in an implicit general theory of psychology that simply doesn't yet exist. Behavioral psychologists have trouble finding the relevance of grammaticality judgments to language production and comprehension, so they don't tend to hang out with generative linguists in Chomsky's school very much. (Steve Pinker is a relatively rare exception these days, and Pinker has developed something of a rift with Chomsky.)

The point I want to make is that a theory of language behavior will naturally ground itself in as many aspects of general cognitive abilities as it can. It won't necessarily treat the language capacity as so compartmentalized. In fact, well-formedness intuitions may just be related to our general cognitive ability to introspectively examine our own behavioral strategies. That is, we judge an expression well-formed if we can imagine ourselves (or other native speakers) using that expression in normal discourse. If that is true, then linguists have put the cart before the horse. They have based their field of study on Chomsky's false premise that linguistic intuition is the basic raison d'etre of grammatical structure, and Chomsky's formal approach to language is on very shaky ground.

 

[untermensche]

I don't thinks so. The explanation seems rather that all human beings developing a language using their voice have to comply with a large set of constraints. The varieties of human languages throughout the world may just about cover the range of what it is practical to achieve given those constraints. Do we know of any artificial language humans could learn and use to communicate that would be way out of the existing range of human languages?

People have actually looked at this.

Chomsky does not make anything up.

When looked at hierarchically Chomsky and others have found that all studied languages are variations on consistent themes. They are stereotypical.

This suggests an underlying mechanism in the brain that help to shape their formation. A mental template.

Of course using the voice forces language to be presented in a linear fashion.

But Chomsky has found hierarchical constraints.

The constraints of using a voice are the constraints of the number of sounds you can faithfully produce and understand.

Most languages don't use all kinds of sounds humans can make.

So sound production is not a constraint.

Like building a similar nest requires an underlying nest building capacity.

Wrong supporting example. Nests are not specific to birds:

No it is the absolutely perfect example.

If you observe similar appearing birds building similar nests yet the birds have no contact with one another that suggests a neural "program", a template in the brain somewhere.

If you see humans that have no contact with one another building similar languages you must assume there is some neural template that allows it.

Why would language need a specific capability?

That is just like asking why would vision need a specific capability.

Why wouldn't our general mental capabilities be enough to do the job?

Gorillas and chimps share our general mental capabilities.

What they do not share is the language capacity.

There's no good reason to call that a "language capacity" like you do, and it's definitely not a good reason that people like Chomsky should call it so without any good reason. It just creates confusion.

When the capacity is dealing with language either in production or comprehension it is the language capacity.

Like when the legs are running they are part of the running capacity.

Vision is produced because of the visual capacity.

 

[fromderinside]

They have based their field of study on Chomsky's false premise that linguistic intuition is the basic raison d'etre of grammatical structure, and Chomsky's formal approach to language is on very shaky ground.

I'm calling Jello alert. *

*^{_{couldn't resist}}

 

[steve_bank]

Nice summary. Admittedly I know little about professional linguistics.

I've watched Chomp ski years back in videos and interviews. He made some observations on the link between language, control, and behavior but any good marketer or policeman knows how to make propaganda.

As to cart before the horse, who knows how language got started. It must have had early survival value. It would require an understanding of human invention and creativity at the neural level. Did thoughts exist and a sort of metaphysics before articulate speech?

There was a book called The Bicameral Mind or something close. The theory as I remember was that what we call schizophrenia today was a normal state of consciousness. People worked out problems through hearing voices and seeing images. And that this may have led to the first mythologies. It was bred out with the rise of logic and reason based on language.

I expected the OP was likely taken out of context.

 

[steve_bank]

Esperanto. The language that would become the global language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

 

[steve_bank]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

'Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN; Spanish: Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua) is a sign language that was largely spontaneously developed by deaf children in a number of schools in western Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. It is of particular interest to the linguists who study it, because it offers a unique opportunity to study what they believe to be the birth of a new language.'

I watched a show on it. It developed without any adults being aware of it, kids were observed using it.

 

[Copernicus]

People have actually looked at this.

Chomsky does not make anything up.

When looked at hierarchically Chomsky and others have found that all studied languages are variations on consistent themes. They are stereotypical.

This suggests an underlying mechanism in the brain that help to shape their formation. A mental template.

There are other possible explanations that you know nothing about. What you call "hierarchical" appears to refer to his theory of phrase structure, which is one of many syntactic theories, even within the school of generative linguistic theory. But not all explanations of word order typology rely on phrase structure theory. Few of Chomsky's ideas about the acquisition of language have actually led to productive explanations of linguistic behavior in actual studies of language acquisition.

Of course using the voice forces language to be presented in a linear fashion.

But Chomsky has found hierarchical constraints.

The constraints of using a voice are the constraints of the number of sounds you can faithfully produce and understand.

Most languages don't use all kinds of sounds humans can make.

So sound production is not a constraint.

Actually, there has been an argument that syllable structure is what drives the typological distribution of canonical word order, but you don't have the background in phonetics and phonology to understand it. For starters, you need to know about open and closed syllables, why languages tend to prefer open syllables, and how closed syllables come into existence over time.

But there are quite a few ideas out there that attempt to account for word order preferences across the world's languages.

 

[untermensche]

They also do not need to worry about what causes people to use the expressions they do in running discourse, what words they choose to express themselves, or how they come to comprehend running speech.

If you are talking about ultimate motivation you are talking about something that Chomsky cares a lot about.

But how do you get at it?

Chomsky sings praises to the ordinary person and their level of creativity in what would be called "everyday conversation". But he has no idea nor does anyone how that creativity arises.

Linguists explain all of the different ways a sentence can be ambiguous, but they don't have to say anything about how speakers and listeners actually get a single, coherent meaning from it in discourse.

Nobody knows the answer to this.

But most definitely this is something Chomsky cares about.

His language capacity includes the ability to comprehend language.

His minimalist program is his and others work to try to find the most simple computational algorithm to produce and comprehend language.

They have based their field of study on Chomsky's false premise that linguistic intuition is the basic raison d'etre of grammatical structure, and Chomsky's formal approach to language is on very shaky ground.

Here Chomsky explains what he thinks is happening to the field of linguistics and why he thinks it is going to become marginalized. It is long but if you care he carefully explains his position.

 

[Copernicus]

They also do not need to worry about what causes people to use the expressions they do in running discourse, what words they choose to express themselves, or how they come to comprehend running speech.

If you are talking about ultimate motivation you are talking about something that Chomsky cares a lot about.

But how do you get at it?

Chomsky sings praises to the ordinary person and their level of creativity in what would be called "everyday conversation". But he has no idea nor does anyone how that creativity arises.

You missed my point. He deliberately excludes such concerns from his formal study of language, and, because he has been a dominant figure in the field for so long, he has held other linguists back from examining it. It doesn't matter whether he professes to care about the issue or sings praises of creativity. In the past, he has ridiculed attempts of others to treat linguistic production as a central issue in the study of grammars, ignoring the fact that people must somehow strive to achieve grammatical well-formedness when they produce utterances.

Linguists explain all of the different ways a sentence can be ambiguous, but they don't have to say anything about how speakers and listeners actually get a single, coherent meaning from it in discourse.

Nobody knows the answer to this.

Nonsense. There are all sorts of theories out there that attempt to disambiguate linguistic expressions. Much of the progress made has come out of approaches to computational linguistics and natural language processing, because AI researchers have been tasked with understanding and generating coherent discourse. Chomsky's approach largely ignores the study of discourse, because he has only been interested in explaining the structure of isolated sentences. Hence, AI researchers have had to turn to various semantic and discourse theories that were developed independently of his framework. Chomsky is notoriously narrow-minded in his approach to discourse.

But most definitely this is something Chomsky cares about.

His language capacity includes the ability to comprehend language.

His minimalist program is his and others work to try to find the most simple computational algorithm to produce and comprehend language.

He would like his program to achieve results in that area, but it hasn't. Meanwhile, other approaches to linguistic processing have moved on out of sheer necessity to make progress. Current approaches are limited in their success and are not scalable, as true language processing requires full AI capability, i.e. humanlike knowledge and intelligence. Chomsky's approach is not among those that achieve even limited results. I worked for years with a so-called deep syntactic parser that relied on a formal approach related to generative theory. We implemented a fairly sophisticated grammar checking application, but we had to resort to all sorts of tricks to make it work in a practical sense. Again, the problem was that we were working with an approach to grammar that had no serious method to do discourse analysis, because generative theory is based on the grammar of isolated sentences.

They have based their field of study on Chomsky's false premise that linguistic intuition is the basic raison d'etre of grammatical structure, and Chomsky's formal approach to language is on very shaky ground.

Here Chomsky explains what he thinks is happening to the field of linguistics and why he thinks it is going to become marginalized. It is long but if you care he carefully explains his position.

<deleted>

You already posted this video in another thread, and I have reviewed it. It is no more illuminating than his past lectures on this subject, and I have some serious disagreements with what he has to say.

 

[steve_bank]

I read a book Breaking The Mayan Code about figuring out the Mayan language. 'There was an academic who had position and influence. He stifled alternative approaches and destroyed careers. It wasn't until he died that real progress was made.

Copernicus, may I ask what your background is?

 

[Copernicus]

I read a book Breaking The Mayan Code about figuring out the Mayan language. 'There was an academic who had position and influence. He stifled alternative approaches and destroyed careers. It wasn't until he died that real progress was made.

Copernicus, may I ask what your background is?

I have a Ph.D. in theoretical linguistics from Ohio State University (1973). Several of my teachers were 1st generation students of Noam Chomsky. First job as an assistant professor of linguistics at Columbia University/Barnard College, where I taught a wide variety of courses in syntax, semantics, language acquisition, and phonology in both the graduate and undergraduate programs. After 8 years with the Columbia Corporation, I spent a few years at Hofstra University while working in Natural Language Processing and computational linguistics. My career until 1987 was primarily academic, but after that I went to work in industry at Boeing Research and Technology as an AI researcher, where I worked on a wide variety of projects that spanned everything from text processing to robotics. Now retired.

FTR, I admire untermensche's efforts to understand Chomsky, but he really should have had formal training in linguistic theory to have sufficient background to understand what he was reading and studying. There is a lot of specialized knowledge and historical background that is necessary for a proper understanding of what Chomsky achieved. Untermensche gets some things right, but he also mixes it with a lot of confusion and misunderstanding.

The field of linguistics is far more varied and complex than just Noam Chomsky's school of formal generative linguistics. For one thing, Chomsky takes a very psychological approach to linguistic theory, so he tends to ignore a number of branches that ought to be given more attention--linguistic typology, historical linguistics, diachronic linguistics (i.e. study of language change), sociolinguistics, etc. A linguistic system can be approached from two different perspectives--the psychological aspect of that system in an individual or the social aspect in a speech community. Chomsky tends to focus on just the psychological aspect and neglects social phenomena. Hence, he has very little to say about linguistic discourse theory, which involves a communicative exchange among multiple speakers.

 

[untermensche]

You missed my point. He deliberately excludes such concerns from his formal study of language, and, because he has been a dominant figure in the field for so long, he has held other linguists back from examining it. It doesn't matter whether he professes to care about the issue or sings praises of creativity. In the past, he has ridiculed attempts of others to treat linguistic production as a central issue in the study of grammars, ignoring the fact that people must somehow strive to achieve grammatical well-formedness when they produce utterances.

He has not excluded anything.

He would love to understand motivations. But nobody does.

It is a dead end right now.

A barren wasteland of ignorance.

Nonsense. There are all sorts of theories out there that attempt to disambiguate linguistic expressions. Much of the progress made has come out of approaches to computational linguistics and natural language processing, because AI researchers have been tasked with understanding and generating coherent discourse. Chomsky's approach largely ignores the study of discourse, because he has only been interested in explaining the structure of isolated sentences. Hence, AI researchers have had to turn to various semantic and discourse theories that were developed independently of his framework. Chomsky is notoriously narrow-minded in his approach to discourse.

These are the very efforts Chomsky condemns in the video you never watched.

And he does not just condemn. He carefully and patiently explains how they are misguided.

He uses the example of looking out the window at leaves being blown around and trying to understand the principles that are making it happen.

You can create an incredible amount of statistical information.

And you can even use that information to make crude predictions.

But you do not understand why it is happening. You will not understand why anything is happening by doing this.

All you have are your statistics. No isolated principles.

Chomsky is looking for why language happens and why it happens the way it happens.

He is looking to define principles of the language "mechanism".

He is not interested in applying statistics to utterances and never understanding anything about why they are occurring.

He would like his program to achieve results in that area, but it hasn't.

Not true. It advances yearly.

But like all aspects of the "mind" understanding is stalled because the activity in the brain that leads to the "mind" is not known.

You already posted this video in another thread, and I have reviewed it. It is no more illuminating than his past lectures on this subject, and I have some serious disagreements with what he has to say.

Watch it. Especially the Q&A. He exposes a lot of bad thinking.

One of the most impressive examples of a single mind showing it's dominance in a room full of great minds I have ever seen.

Chomsky has thought about a lot for a long time. He has excluded only that which he feels goes nowhere.

 

[steve_bank]

I read a book Breaking The Mayan Code about figuring out the Mayan language. 'There was an academic who had position and influence. He stifled alternative approaches and destroyed careers. It wasn't until he died that real progress was made.

Copernicus, may I ask what your background is?

I have a Ph.D. in theoretical linguistics from Ohio State University (1973). Several of my teachers were 1st generation students of Noam Chomsky. First job as an assistant professor of linguistics at Columbia University/Barnard College, where I taught a wide variety of courses in syntax, semantics, language acquisition, and phonology in both the graduate and undergraduate programs. After 8 years with the Columbia Corporation, I spent a few years at Hofstra University while working in Natural Language Processing and computational linguistics. My career until 1987 was primarily academic, but after that I went to work in industry at Boeing Research and Technology as an AI researcher, where I worked on a wide variety of projects that spanned everything from text processing to robotics. Now retired.

FTR, I admire untermensche's efforts to understand Chomsky, but he really should have had formal training in linguistic theory to have sufficient background to understand what he was reading and studying. There is a lot of specialized knowledge and historical background that is necessary for a proper understanding of what Chomsky achieved. Untermensche gets some things right, but he also mixes it with a lot of confusion and misunderstanding.

The field of linguistics is far more varied and complex than just Noam Chomsky's school of formal generative linguistics. For one thing, Chomsky takes a very psychological approach to linguistic theory, so he tends to ignore a number of branches that ought to be given more attention--linguistic typology, historical linguistics, diachronic linguistics (i.e. study of language change), sociolinguistics, etc. A linguistic system can be approached from two different perspectives--the psychological aspect of that system in an individual or the social aspect in a speech community. Chomsky tends to focus on just the psychological aspect and neglects social phenomena. Hence, he has very little to say about linguistic discourse theory, which involves a communicative exchange among multiple speakers.

Thanks. What are the general practical applications of linguistics and can you recommend a basic general text?

 

[Speakpigeon]

I don't thinks so. The explanation seems rather that all human beings developing a language using their voice have to comply with a large set of constraints. The varieties of human languages throughout the world may just about cover the range of what it is practical to achieve given those constraints. Do we know of any artificial language humans could learn and use to communicate that would be way out of the existing range of human languages?

People have actually looked at this.

Chomsky does not make anything up.

When looked at hierarchically Chomsky and others have found that all studied languages are variations on consistent themes. They are stereotypical.

This suggests an underlying mechanism in the brain that help to shape their formation. A mental template.

Of course using the voice forces language to be presented in a linear fashion.

But Chomsky has found hierarchical constraints.

The constraints of using a voice are the constraints of the number of sounds you can faithfully produce and understand.

Most languages don't use all kinds of sounds humans can make.

So sound production is not a constraint.

All human languages have to comply with this constraint of a linear delivery. There's also the necessity for any human language to be able to articulate human thought and human thought is also structured. The human mind generally seems to use a network structure but I seems that conscious thought has essentially a large-scale network structure to connect the dots with a short-scale hierarchical structure for efficiency. My view is that a hierarchical structure for language is the optimal one. I'm sure we could do it differently if we tried hard but that would just be a waste of time, energy and efficiency, except perhaps in some contexts like using the morse code. Those who try it don't reproduce or they don't even get to live to see if it could work in the long run. I don't think there is any other complex structure possible for a language not only relying on the human voice for its delivery but also on the human mind to produce it.

Wrong supporting example. Nests are not specific to birds:

No it is the absolutely perfect example.

If you observe similar appearing birds building similar nests yet the birds have no contact with one another that suggests a neural "program", a template in the brain somewhere.

If you see humans that have no contact with one another building similar languages you must assume there is some neural template that allows it.

No. They don't need the contact with each other. All birds broadly share the same mental capacity. I think it's sufficient to explain similarity in nest-building.

And, humans, too, broadly share the same mental capacity. Brains have evolved a capacity to represent the world. But the world is continuous, while brains can only use modular, digital models so thought has to be organised and eventually structured, possibly using network and/or hierarchical structure. So my assumption is that anything we need to develop a language is already there in the way human thought works. The difference is that language not thought has to go through voice delivery, which just adds more constraints on its structure.

Why would language need a specific capability?

That is just like asking why would vision need a specific capability.

No, it's not. We already have a thinking capability. I think that must have come first! It's also obvious that vision has to have it's own specific brain area devoted to it. I fail to see why language would need such a specific brain area, especially given that language use cannot be dissociated from thinking.

Also, vision is a perception. Language is not. From the point of view of the brain, the activity required for language is more like the activity required for using your hands to do things, including for communicating, either at a distance or through close contact.

So, if you want to make a comparison, you should give on vision.

Why wouldn't our general mental capabilities be enough to do the job?

Gorillas and chimps share our general mental capabilities.

What they do not share is the language capacity.

No, gorillas and chimps don't have our mental capability by a long shot.

There's no good reason to call that a "language capacity" like you do, and it's definitely not a good reason that people like Chomsky should call it so without any good reason. It just creates confusion.

When the capacity is dealing with language either in production or comprehension it is the language capacity.

Like when the legs are running they are part of the running capacity.

Vision is produced because of the visual capacity.

Something you would need to argue properly to be at all convincing.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Much of the progress made has come out of approaches to computational linguistics and natural language processing, because AI researchers have been tasked with understanding and generating coherent discourse. Chomsky's approach largely ignores the study of discourse, because he has only been interested in explaining the structure of isolated sentences. Hence, AI researchers have had to turn to various semantic and discourse theories that were developed independently of his framework. Chomsky is notoriously narrow-minded in his approach to discourse.

Sentences typically are hierarchical but people can and will jump from one idea to another between two sentences within the same discourse, even very well thought out speeches, like political ones for example. I do it myself. We all do it. Jumping requires a network structure whereby the subject can associate ideas not part of the same hierarchical structure. Yet, when we express one idea, one point, using language, the delivery will be in a few hierarchical sentences organised also hierarchically between themselves.
EB