Language Acquisition Device Found

Associated Linguists Press (ALP)
April 2006

At a recent press conference

PROGRAM HELLO PRINT *, 'Hello, world!' END — FORTRAN

in Istanbul Prof. I. Jones, chief on-site archeologist at an excavation of an Upper Paleolithic site in central Turkey, made an announcement that stunned the linguistics community: a language acquisition device, or “LAD” has been found. The LAD has long been the object of speculation among linguists and cognitive scientists concerned with the evolutionary origins and nature of language, but until now no one had actually seen one. The unexpected find was credited to a linguistics graduate student who had fortuitously volunteered to work at the dig site. During the usual painstaking process of brushing away layers of debris and sediment to unearth fragile remains, the student noticed what appeared to be a raised argument structure protruding from the dust. Careful excavation revealed an intact LAD, apparently mummified in mid-recursion. The find was immediately rushed to the Gov Bindmeister Center for Advanced Linguistic, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (CALBBS) at Tübingen for analysis.

Professor Null Set, spokesman for CALBBS and one of the foremost proponents of the Pure Language theory, was at the press conference and confirmed the finding. “We are now in the early stages

MODULE Hello; FROM InOut IMPORT WriteLn, WriteString; BEGIN WriteString ("Hello, world!"); WriteLn END Hello. — Modula-2

of trying to isolate the genetic structure of the device,” he reported. “If we can extract viable tissue, we may be able to produce a biological replica. This would allow the first-ever empirical study of language in its pure state, not only uncontaminated by the influences of input from ordinary spoken languages, but also liberated from the limitations attendant on the linguistic performance of actual human beings.”

Soft tissue remains such as these are extremely rare finds in archeology, Prof. Jones admitted. “This device appears to have been preserved in a highly saline environment, bearing certain similarities to the natron solutions used by the ancient Egyptians in the process of mummification,” he explained. “We speculate that the LAD was a victim of the explosion of tool use that accompanied the emergence of language in the Upper Paleolithic era, around 40-60,000 years ago.”

“We would expect that most LADs would have found refuge inside human brains,”

print "Hello, world!" — Python

added Professor Set. “They would thus have been protected from the explosion by several levels of representation, particularly the phonological and logical forms associated with surface structure, and also by the cognitive closure that characterized humans who had yet to reap the evolutionary benefits of successive generations of language use. However, such a neurological ‘refuge’ also would have ensured that the LADs perished without a trace along with the rest of the soft tissue of their hosts once the human being died. The LAD that we found appears to have been an evolutionary failure in this respect—it was isolated outside a brain. But what was a loss from a Darwinian perspective has turned into a major gain for twenty-first century cognitive science.”

:V+++++;:XVV;:v-----;:xvv;XXXXXXX++. <XXXXXXXXXX+.V++..+++.<XXX++.>>XV.XX ++++.+++.v-.x++.<XXX+++.<X.> — Toadskin

“This finding constitutes incontrovertible evidence against the Sink theory,” concluded Professor Set, referring to the well-known views of Prof. K. Sink, who claims that every dimension of language use and all features of the social and cultural environment in which linguistic communication occurs, inform the development and structure of language. Professor Sink could not be reached for comment.

—R. Davis, ALP; Marc P. Parameter and Mini M. List also contributed observations to this article.

[While we SpecGram editors don’t usually editorialize—despite the apparent etymological imperative to do so—we feel that this article should make some reference to the groundbreaking work of Lucas Carl Hayfield, whose work and death was reported on in this great publication. Reluctantly, we feel we must take the authors lightly to task for not having read this important work.—Eds.]

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