Elizabeth Bates and the Search for the Roots of Human Language

We might say, following the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson and the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek, that the development of language is the result of human action but not of human design.2 Moreover, the humans performing these actions are just regular people speaking and writing intuitively, not fancy experts who’ve researched the rules.

Chomsky’s critique revolved around the question of whether human language could be understood strictly in terms of a history of what happened in the external environment surrounding the individual