This chapter analyses how poetry of the late nineteenth century were mythopoetic exercises which promoted a nativist labour poetics that typically subtended the primary conflict of settler colonialism. It analyses how the heroicisation of bush work in the 1870s was built upon in the late 1890s when economic depression and changes to labour conditions saw a tightened alignment between labour to values of citizenship, civilisation and moral virtue. While 1890s poetry depicted the material and psychological consequences of capitalism and economic depression, its advocacy for workers’ rights were racially bound and can be mapped onto events that led to the White Australia policy. The chapter also discusses the influence of correspondence with Walt Whitman in Bernard O’Dowd’s vision of radical nationalism, yet also how such vision was likewise racially limited.

In Chapter 3, I examine Joshua Henry Jones, Jr.’s By Sanction of Law, serialized in the Pittsburgh Courier and Baltimore Afro-American. By including a white man, a pregnant Black woman, and a New Negro character as among the lynching victims, describing the lynchings in the novel’s real time, crafting his lynching scenes as “liminal crucibles” propelling dramatic white racial reckonings, and depicting what appears as an interracial romance, Jones offers a more radical antilynching vision than does Rogers. In direct opposition to the dictates of white supremacist eugenicists, Jones evokes Israel Zangwill’s melting pot as the remedy to America’s lynch logic. Although the novel does not directly mention twenties-era racial-purity campaigns or the nativism and interracial marriage bans they generated, within the context of the newspapers, it deeply engages these movements. Like Rogers, Jones emphasized both the essential performative nature of American identity, epitomized by the New Negro’s education, demeanor, and work ethic, but unlike Rogers, Jones raised the nativist specter of radical immigrant agitators.

In this introductory chapter, I will outline what this book is about and aims to achieve, which is to continue what I started in a prequel book, A Mind for Language: An Introduction to the Innateness Debate (ML). Both books share the same central theme, namely the so-called Innateness Hypothesis for language, which is the conjecture proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky many decades ago that children acquire language guided by an innate, genetically based mental system that is specifically dedicated to this task. Both ML and this book critically examine the arguments that have been used, or could be used, to support this idea. Where ML considered arguments coming from linguistics proper, the present book delves into arguments from neighboring fields that overlap with linguistics in various ways, including cognitive science and neurolinguistics. The chapter concludes with a review of the linguistic arguments in support of Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis that formed the focus of ML.

Rather than thinking of nature versus nurture it is better to think about interactions between genes and the environment. The Santa Barbara School of evolutionary psychology proposed that human cognition is the result of innately specified domain-specific mental modules. Babies have certain expectations of the way that the physical world operates. Infants of at least three months of age have the knowledge that objects exist independently of their ability to perceive them. Babies have preference for face-like stimuli from birth and learn the details of human faces rapidly. Young children have an understanding of the role of mental states as a cause of behaviour. This skill, known as theory of mind, becomes more sophisticated as children develop. It is measured by a number of tasks such as false belief task and the eyes test, in which participants are required to judge how people feel from looking at their eyes.

My work has been primarily located in two fields, both characterized by heated disagreements when I entered them. In child language research the nativist view was the default position in the late 1960s and through the next couple of decades. But in 1967 I studied adult input to children, in service of understanding its contributions to language acquisition. By the 2020s the notion that certain features of adult-child interaction are instrumental in language development has been robustly supported by multiple lines of work. I first got involved in thinking about literacy development in the mid-1990s during a time of conflict between what was then framed as “phonics” versus “whole language.” That conflict resurfaces with depressing regularity and is currently characterized as a struggle to implement the “science of reading.” The complexities in the reading domain are far greater than in language acquisition because of the larger role of educational publishers and school administrators in determining a course of action.

Word Grammar is a linguistic theory which best known as a variant of Dependency Grammar. However, it has a number of other properties, and its architectural assumptions are consistent with its theory of how human cognition works and its theory of how representations work. In this chapter we relate Word Grammar (WG) to a number of different trends in linguistic theorising and explain the various traditions that the theory belongs to. Word Grammar belongs in three main theoretical traditions: Dependency Grammars, Constraint-based Grammars and Cognitive Linguistics. We show how WG relates to these approaches and explore how the network model of linguistic representation adopted by WG relates to each tradition. The key claim of WG is that language is represented in a symbolic network, which is part of a more general human cognitive network and which is in a relationship with a discreet neural network.

The aim of this chapter is to provide an understanding of the structural constraints and opportunities for the populist radical right (PRR) in Latin America. Unlike Western Europe, material values are still of vital importance in many Latin American countries because of high levels of inequality in the region. This represents a major constraint for the emergence of the PRR, and only some parties have been able to overcome it. The author argues that the growth of the PRR relies on three factors: the appeal of the PRR’s hardline discourses, the mobilization of voters dissatisfied with sexual and reproductive rights and secularization, and a crisis of representation among the traditional parties, who are painted by PRR leaders as a corrupt elite.

The chapter examines how the radical Right’s counter-hegemonic struggle relates to other struggles for power in contemporary world politics and attacks on the so-called liberal international order (LIO). Drawing on recent literature on struggles for recognition, we show how the radical Right has built powerful transversal, global alliances based on a logic and discourse of difference and diversity rather than claims to Western superiority. We illustrate this through an analysis of an emerging global alliance in defence of the ‘natural family’. The radical Right’s civilisationalism and calls for multipolarity also enable complex, strategic convergences with illiberal states such as China and Russia, as well as states and people in the Global South. The multi-polar, civilisational world order envisioned by the radical Right is not anti-hierarchical and inclusive, but legitimises new differences and new forms of exclusion through its claims to cultural diversity. It is a more sovereigntist vision of the world in which exclusionary illiberal forces would be able to operate with fewer international constraints.

In Chapter 2, I focus on the acquisition of number concepts related to natural numbers. I review nativist views, as well as Dehaene’s early view that number concepts arise from estimations due to the approximate numbers system. I end up focusing in most detail on the bootstrapping account of Carey and Beck, according to which the object tracking system is the key cognitive resource used in number concept acquisition. However, I endorse a hybrid account that also includes an important role for the approximate numerosity system. I then review some of the criticism against the bootstrapping account, concluding that, while more empirical data is needed to establish its correctness and details, currently it provides the most plausible account of early number concept acquisition.

In Chapter 14 I review all the linguistic arguments in support of the Innateness Hypothesis that we have critically examined in this book. I first summarize these arguments. We will then have a number of imaginary speakers (any resemblance to actual people in the field is purely coincidental) reflecting on the Innateness Hypothesis, and on the force of the various arguments pro and con. In this chapter I also briefly preview the arguments that are discussed in a sequel book (Genes, Brains and Evolution: The Language Debate Continued), which critically examines arguments in potential support of the Innateness Hypothesis for language that are based on other disciplines than linguistics proper. In this sequel book, we review how the nature–nurture debate has played out in a number of other sciences, such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, computational science, and a variety of biological disciplines, such as ethology and evolutionary science.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

After the US entered WWI, federal and state governments took action to suppress or even ban the use of languages other than English through the mails, in schools, and in various public settings. Moves to require English targeted nonanglophones, whether they were born in the US or had immigrated from elsewhere, and official English became a rallying cry for those bent on reducing or eliminating immigration. But such laws have little impact on the acquisition of English, as newcomers to the US continue to acquire English at rates equal to or better than those in previous generations. Without official language legislation at the federal level, the US manages to have more monolingual speakers of the majority language than many nations that do impose language bans on their residents.

This chapter is about the category of innateness, which is a feature often associated with a range of cognitive phenomena, including concepts, cognitive capacities, behavioral dispositions, and mental states. Arguing against a number of recent critiques of the notion, this chapter tries to show that innateness can be identified with a cluster of properties that are causally interrelated in various ways and proposes a tentative causal model of the kind. In individuating innateness, it is important to distinguish proximal from distal causation. Some of the causal properties associated with innateness are involved in individuating innate cognitive capacities synchronically, while others are etiological in nature, responsible for making those capacities innate in the first place. This complex causal network is robust enough to warrant considering innateness to be a real kind as used in contemporary cognitive science.