The nature of language

Sand dunes have apparent regularities of shape and structure, yet they also exhibit considerable variation among individual instances, as well as gradience and change over time. If we want to gain understanding of phenomena that are both structured and variable, it is necessary to look beyond the mutable surface forms to the forces that produce the patterns observed. Language is also a phenomenon that exhibits apparent structure and regularity of patterning while at the same time showing considerable variation at all levels: languages differ from one another while still being patently shaped by the same principles; comparable constructions in different languages serve similar functions and are based on similar principles, yet differ from one another in specifiable ways; utterances within a language differ from one another while still exhibiting the same structural patterns; languages change over time, but in fairly regular ways. Thus it follows that a theory of language could reasonably be focused on the dynamic processes that create languages and give them both their structure and their variance.

A focus on the dynamic processes that create language also allows us to move away from an exclusive focus on linguistic structures and formulate a broader goal: to derive linguistic structure from the application of domain-general processes. In this context, domain-general processes would be those that can be shown to operate in areas of human cognition other than language.