In this chapter, we look at a number of disciplines that study human behavior, noting that the nature–nurture issue plays a central role in all of them, albeit leading to divergent views and controversies. I select some key disciplines, making no effort to be complete. My main goal is to show that every study of human behavior inevitably asks what the roles are of innate factors and of a variety of environmental factors, and how they interact. In all cases, we find defenders of more nativist/rationalist and more empiricist approaches. I will reiterate that this debate is not only relevant to academics: Views on the roles of nature and nurture have a direct impact on many aspects of daily human life. All people will sooner or later have to take a stance on issues that concern their own lives or the lives of others, including their children, parents, or friends. It is important to see how views that different people hold with respect to, for example, education and equality, are ultimately dependent on how they think (often subconsciously), or what biases they have, about human nature and human diversity.

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.

In this chapter we discuss a shift in Chomsky’s thinking about the extent to which the acquisition of language is based on a language-domain-specific innate system. The initial idea was that children develop their mental grammar based on two factors: a “richly articulated” innate system, called Universal Grammar (UG), and the language input. Chomsky later decided that the innate language faculty can be reduced to a single operation, “recursive Merge.” This made it necessary to acknowledge a third category of factors that plays a sizeable role in the emergence of mental grammars. These third factors cover a mixed bag, including “general learning systems” (those that empiricists would always have emphasized) and another kind of factor, which Chomsky finds more interesting: “natural laws of form” that are grounded in the laws of physics and perhaps ultimately in mathematical principles. We will discuss this notion of third factors, and I will show that attempts to explain the structure of human mental faculties in terms of principles that determine much, if not everything, in the natural world (both mind-internal and mind-external) are widespread and have a long tradition.

Chapter 3 concentrates on the semiotics of onomatopoeia, mainly the frequently discussed issues of iconicity, arbitrariness, and motivation. It is claimed that rather than opposing terms, arbitrariness and motivation are complementary notions. It introduces the concept of causality into the discussion of the nature of onomatopoeia as linguistic signs. The chapter discusses five basic oppositions: causality versus noncausality; arbitrariness versus nonarbitrariness; iconicity versus non-iconicity; motivation versus lexicalization; and conventionalization versus nonconventionalization. Considerable attention is paid to the views that criticize Saussure’s comprehension of onomatopoeia and his concept of arbitrariness. Arguments are presented in support of Saussure’s position. In addition, Peirce’s triad of hypo-icons (image, diagram, metaphor) is discussed in terms of their relevance to the characterization of onomatopoeias.

For languages that recognize ideophones, it is quite common to discuss onomatopoeia under the umbrella of ideophones, that is, words based on our sensory perception: hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, and psychological feeling. This chapter examines the similarities and differences between onomatopoeia conceived as causally determined direct sound imitations and cross-modal ideophones to evaluate whether the ‘all-sensory’ approach is justified or whether onomatopoeia represents – from a cross-linguistic point of view – a class of words of their own. While similarities and shared features exist between onomatopoeias and other sensory signs, the available literature offers numerous indications of a different status of ideophones and onomatopoeia. Some of the reasons are of universal nature, and others are language specific. This chapter starts with an overview of the characteristic features of ideophones. Its structure maps the individual points of onomatopoeia description presented in Chapter 3 (semiotic characteristics), Chapter 4 (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, word-formation, and sociopragmatic characteristics), and Chapter 6 (cross-linguistic similarities), as well as the word-class and open-class criteria. This is followed by a comparison of ideophones as cross-modal sensory words with onomatopoeia as monomodal sensory words. The final sections look at their universal and language-specific similarities and differences.

The final chapter provides a brief summary of the achievements, identifies limitations of the presented research, and indicates the directions of future onomatopoeia exploration.

This chapter examines the extent of similarities between onomatopoeias representing identical or similar sound events. Since onomatopoeias are causally determined iconic images and indexes, one might expect a high degree of cross-linguistic similarity. As Akita and Imai (2022: 29) note in their model of an iconicity ring, onomatopoeias as instances of primary iconicity are characterized by early acquisition and, importantly, universality. Another factor that should contribute to the cross-linguistic similarity of onomatopoeic words is the phenomenon of sound symbolism, in particular, the existence of universal phonesthemes. Nevertheless, Chapter 6 identifies a range of factors affecting the level of cross-linguistic similarity, including psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, language-inherent factors as well as those related to the imitated sound event. This chapter identifies onomatopoeic patterns for eighteen sound events based on the sample data. The criteria include the number and the structure of the syllables, the type of the onset, nucleus, and coda, presence/absence of iconic reduplication, and vowel/consonant lengthening. An analysis of these patterns makes it possible to draw typological generalizations.

If some human trait or capacity is innate, it would seem that there is a genetic basis for it. This chapter explores this possibility with respect to language. We start this chapter with some genetics basics, and we will learn that there is a basis for saying that the human capacity for language has a genetic grounding, although exactly what this meansy is not so easy to establish, because the relationship between the genome and specific aspects of human mental abilities and behavior is very complex. One thing is certain: There is no (single) “gene for language.” Evidence about which genes have an impact on language often comes from people whose language abilities show certain atypical characteristics that are assumed to have a genetic basis when no other conceivable cause seems to be involved. A very important topic in this chapter is epigenetics, which is the science that studies how environmental factors can impact gene expression. This mechanism may hold the key to how nature and nurture interact in general, and the lesson to be learned is that these two factors do not compete or work independently. Rather, they are two sides of the same coin.

This chapter discusses a major contribution that Noam Chomsky made to the study of human language, which was to consider human languages in terms of generative, formalized rule systems, i.e., a formal grammar. Chomsky established a hierarchy of grammar types that differ in their so-called generative capacity, which allowed him and others to locate what kind of formal grammar within this hierarchy is needed for human languages. This hierarchy also proved useful in defining the grammars that are needed for computer languages or “languages” of nonhuman species (or even imaginable artificial or mathematical “languages”), and thus found applications in many other areas. We will ask what kinds of formal grammars can be taken as models of the mental grammars that language learners construct, considering recent developments in both formal language theory and the theory of natural language syntax. We will see that the field of formal language theory is a vibrant area of linguistics that continues to develop new methods and applications not only to syntax, but also to phonology. We will also ask whether formal language theory sheds light on the hypothesized innate language capacity.