His main contribution to linguistics is Transformational Generative Grammar, which is founded on mentalist philosophy. He opposes the behaviourist psychology in favour of innatism for explaining the acquisition of language. He claims that it becomes possible for human child to learn a language for the linguistic faculty with which the child is born, and that… Expand. View via Publisher. Save to Library Save. Create Alert Alert. Share This Paper. Background Citations. Methods Citations.
Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. Studia Philologica. The paper offers a preliminary overview of the Chomskian revolution in linguistics, with special emphasis laid on his anthropological stance.
The pivotal ideas of language faculty as a cognitive … Expand. This study sets forth the idea that the binary opposition Saussure proposes … Expand. Highly Influenced. View 3 excerpts, cites background. Research in second language acquisition took off in the early s. This study on integrative and instrumental motivation examined the correlation between the two forms in terms of second language … Expand. Media Type Media Type.
Year Year. Collection Collection. Creator Creator. Language Language. The Umbrella Of U. One is that externalization appears to be independent of sensory modality, as has been learned from studies of sign language in recent years.
More general considerations suggest the same conclusion. The core principle of language, unbounded Merge, must have arisen from some rewiring of the brain, presumably the effect of some small mutation. Such changes take place in an individual, not a group.
The individual so endowed would have had many advantages: capacities for complex thought, planning, interpretation, and so on. Of Minds and Language 23 The capacity would be transmitted to offspring, coming to dominate a small breeding group. At that stage, there would be an advantage to externalization, so the capacity would be linked as a secondary process to the sensorimotor system for externalization and interaction, including communication.
It is not easy to imagine an account of human evolution that does not assume at least this much. And empirical evidence is needed for any additional assumption about the evolution of language. Such evidence is not easy to find.
It is generally supposed that there are precursors to language proceeding from single words, to simple sentences, then more complex ones, and finally leading to unbounded generation. But there is no empirical evidence for the postulated precursors, and no persuasive conceptual argument for them either: Transition from word sentences to unbounded Merge is no easier than transition from single words. A similar issue arises in language acquisition. The modern study of the topic began with the assumption that the child passes through a one and two-word stage, telegraphic speech, and so on.
Again the assumption lacks a rationale, because at some point unbounded Merge must appear. Hence the capacity must have been there all along even if it only comes to function at some later stage. There does appear to be evidence about earlier stages: namely, what children produce.
But that carries little weight. Children understand far more than what they produce, and understand normal language but not their own restricted speech, as was shown long ago by Lila Gleitman and her colleagues Shipley et al. For both evolution and development, there seems little reason to postulate precursors to unbounded Merge. We can, however, go beyond speculation.
Investigation of language design can yield evidence on the relation of language to the interfaces. There is, I think, mounting evidence that the relation is asymmetrical in the manner indicated. There are more radical proposals under which optimal satisfaction of semantic conditions becomes close to tautologous. Even if further inquiry extends the boundaries, it remains a small window, in evolutionary time. The picture is consistent with the idea that some small rewiring of the brain gave rise to unbounded Merge, yielding a language of thought, later externalized and used in many ways.
Aspects of the computational system that do not yield to principled explanation fall under UG, to be explained somehow in other terms, questions that may lie beyond the reach of contemporary inquiry, Richard Lewontin has argued. Also remaining to be accounted for are the apparently human-specific atoms of computation, the minimal word-like elements of thought and language, and the array and structure of parameters, rich topics that I barely mentioned.
At this point we have to move on to more technical discussion than is possible here, but I think it is fair to say that there has been considerable progress in moving towards principled explanation in terms of third factor considerations. It seems now that much of the architecture that has been postulated can be eliminated without loss, often with empirical gain.
Also eliminable on principled grounds are underlying and surface structure, and also logical form, in its technical sense, leaving just the interface levels and their existence too is not graven in stone, a separate topic. And by the same token, any other approach to the phenomenon carries an empirical burden. Some of the island conditions have principled explanations, as does the existence of categories for which there is no direct surface evidence, such as a functional category of inflection.
Variety and complexity of language would then be reduced to the lexicon, which is also the locus of parametric variation, and to the ancillary mappings involved in externalization, which might turn out to be best possible solutions to relating organs with independent origins and properties.
There are huge promissory notes left to pay, and alternatives that merit careful consideration, but plausible reduction of the previously assumed richness of UG has been substantial. With each step towards the goals of principled explanation we gain a clearer grasp of the essential nature of language, and of what remains to be explained in other terms. It should be kept in mind, however, that any such progress still leaves unresolved problems that have been raised for hundreds of years.
And beyond that lies the mysterious problem of the creative and coherent ordinary use of language, a central problem of Cartesian science, still scarcely even at the horizons of inquiry. References Appel, Toby A. New York: Oxford University Press. Baker, Mark.
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