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.

The broad lines of the developmental answer to this question should be familiar by now. Babies are born knowing a great deal about language. They also have powerful learning procedures that allow them to add to that knowledge and, in particular, to learn all the details and peculiarities of the language of their own community. Finally, adults play

In short, language is grounded in awareness of the world.

Language is as much invented as learned. Babies don’t simply soak up associations between names and things or mimic adults’ use of words.