CHOMSKY Members:

Comments on below?

F. Leon

                ---------- Forwarded message ----------

The following is a direct quote from Pinker's The Language Instinct, which
is in turn taken from Brown's work I mentioned in my previous post. I
scanned in the text so there may be a glitch or two, but I think I caught
most of them.  Enjoy:

Richard

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Inspired by Chomsky's Universal Grammar (UG), Brown has tried to
characterize the Universal People (UP). He has scrutinized archives of
ethnography for universal patterns underlying the behavior of all
documented human cultures, keeping a skeptical eye out both for claims of
the exotic belied by the ethnographers' own reports, and for claims of the
universal based on flimsy evidence. The outcome is stunning. Far from
finding arbitrary variation, Brown was able to characterize the Universal
People in gloriously rich detail. His findings contain something to
startle almost anyone, and so I will reproduce the substance of them here.
According to Brown, the Universal People have the following:

Value placed on articulateness. Gossip. Lying. Misleading. Verbal humor.
Humorous insults. Poetic and rhetorical speech forms. Narrative and
storytelling. Metaphor. Poetry with repetition of linguistic elements and
three-second lines separated by pauses. Words for days, months, seasons,
years, past, present, future, body parts, inner states (emotions,
sensations, thoughts), behavioral propensities, flora, fauna, weather,
tools, space, motion, speed, location, spatial dimensions, physical
properties, giving, lending, affecting things and people, numbers (at the
very least "one,"  "two," and "more than two"), proper names, possession.
Distinctions between mother and father. Kinship categories, defined in
terms of mother, father, son, daughter, and age sequence. Binary
distinctions, including male and female, black and white, natural and
cultural, good and bad. Measures.  Logical relations including "not,"
"and," "same," "equivalent," "opposite,"  general versus particular, part
versus whole. Conjectural reasoning (inferring the presence of absent and
invisible entities from their perceptible traces).

Nonlinguistic vocal communication such as cries and squeals. Interpreting
intention from behavior. Recognized facial expressions of happiness,
sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and contempt. Use of smiles as a
friendly greeting. Crying. Coy flirtation with the eyes. Masking,
modifying, and mimicking facial expressions. Displays of affection.

Sense of self versus other, responsibility, voluntary versus involuntary
behavior, intention, private inner life, normal versus abnormal mental
states. Empathy. Sexual attraction. Powerful sexual jealousy. Childhood
fears, especially of loud noises, and, at the end of the first year,
strangers. Fear of snakes. "Oedipal" feelings (possessiveness of mother,
coolness toward her consort). Face recognition. Adornment of bodies and
arrangement of hair. Sexual attractiveness, based in part on signs of
health and, in women, youth. Hygiene. Dance. Music. Hay, including play
fighting.

Manufacture of, and dependence upon, many kinds of tools, many of them
permanent, made according to culturally transmitted motifs, including
cutters, pounders, containers, string, levers, spears. Use of fire to cook
food and for other purposes. Drugs, both medicinal and recreational.
Shelter.  Decoration of artifacts.

A standard pattern and time for weaning. Living in groups, which claim a
territory and have a sense of being a distinct people. Families built
around a mother and children, usually the biological mother, and one or
more men.  Institutionalized marriage, in the sense of publicly recognized
right of sexual access to a woman eligible for childbearing. Socialization
of children (including toilet training) by senior kin. Children copying
their elders.  Distinguishing of close kin from distant kin, and favoring
of close kin.  Avoidance of incest between mothers and sons. Great
interest in the topic of sex.

Status and prestige, both assigned (by kinship, age, sex) and achieved.
Some degree of economic inequality. Division of labor by sex and age. More
child care by women. More aggression and violence by men. Acknowledgment
of differences between male and female natures. Domination by men in the
public political sphere. Exchange of labor, goods, and services.
Reciprocity, including retaliation. Gifts. Social reasoning. Coalitions.
Government, in the sense of binding collective decisions about public
affairs. Leaders, almost always non-dictatorial, perhaps ephemeral. Laws,
rights, and obligations, including laws against violence, rape, and
murder. Punishment.  Conflict, which is deplored. Rape. Seeking of redress
for wrongs. Mediation.  In-group/out-group conflicts. Property.
Inheritance of property. Sense of right and wrong. Envy.

Etiquette. Hospitality. Feasting. Diurnality. Standards of sexual modesty.
Sex generally in private. Fondness for sweets. Food taboos. Discreetness
in elimination of body wastes. Supernatural beliefs. Magic to sustain and
increase life, and to attract the opposite sex. Theories of fortune and
misfortune. Explanations of disease and death. Medicine. Rituals,
including rites of passage. Mourning the dead. Dreaming, interpreting
dreams.

Obviously, this is not a list of instincts or innate psychological
propensities; it is a list of complex interactions between a universal
human nature and the conditions of living in a human body on this planet.
Nor, I hasten to add, is it a characterization of the inevitable, a
demarcation of the possible, or a prescription of the desirable. A list of
human universals a century ago could have included the absence of ice
cream, oral contraceptives, movies, rock and roll, women's suffrage, and
books about the language instinct, but that would not have stood in the
way of these innovations.