ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how two fascinating areas of borderline language research—ape language research (ALR) and work done with children suffering from Specific Language Impairment (SLI)—bear on the debate over the eliminability of “language” and thence the elimination of “culture.” ALR and SLI push us up against the barriers of the reified concept of language that has dominated psycholinguistics for the past generation: the generativist theory that children are born with innate knowledge of the “essence” of language, as this is defined by generativist theory. Language, according to generativist theory, must be formally defined if we are to avoid the problems that arise when the demarcation between language and communication—or, more specifically, between linguistic and nonlinguistic communication—is not strictly observed. The generativist model of language acquisition has been committed from the start, therefore, to excluding anthropology from the study of language acquisition.
