Lecture 5

In N. Chomsky’s view, the reason that children so easily master the complex operations of language is that they have innate knowledge of certain principles. They guide them in developing the grammar of their language. In other words, N. Chomsky’s theory is that language learning is facilitated by a predisposition that our brains have for certain structures of language.

For N. Chomsky’s theory to hold true, all of the languages in the world must share certain structural properties. This theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest without being taught. Linguist made the argument that the human brain contains a limited set of rules for organizing language. There is an assumption that all languages have a common structural basis and this set of rules is known as universal grammar. N. Chomsky said: “Generative grammarians believe that the human species evolved a genetically universal grammar common to all peoples and that the variability in modern languages is basically on the surface only.”

And indeed, he and other generative linguists like him have shown that the 5000 to 6000 languages in the world have very different grammars but share a set of syntactic rules and principles. The linguists believe that this “universal grammar” is innate. It is embedded somewhere in the neuronal circuitry of the human brain. And it is the reason why children can select, from all the sentences that come to their minds, only those that conform to a “deep structure” encoded in the brain’s circuits.

According to N. Chomsky UG consists of a set of unconscious constraints. They let us decide whether a sentence is correctly formed. This mental grammar is not necessarily the same for all languages. But according to Chomskyian theorists, the process by which, in any given language, certain sentences are perceived as correct while others are not, is universal and independent of meaning.

Thus, we immediately perceive that the sentence “Robert book reads the” is incorrect English, even though we have a pretty good idea of what it means. Speakers proficient in a language know what expressions are acceptable in their language and what expressions are unacceptable. The key puzzle is how speakers should come to know the restrictions of their language, since expressions which violate those restrictions are not present in the input, indicated as such. This absence of negative evidence, i.e. absence of evidence that an expression is part of a class of the ungrammatical sentences in one's language, is the core of the poverty of stimulus argument.

The expressions like *What did John meet a man who sold? are not available to the language learners, because they are, by hypothesis, ungrammatical for speakers of the local language. Speakers of the local language do not utter such expressions and note that they are unacceptable to language learners. UG offers a solution to the poverty of the stimulus problem by making certain restrictions universal characteristics of human languages. Language learners are consequently never tempted to generalize in an illicit fashion.

Conversely, we recognize that a sentence such as “ Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. ” is grammatically correct English, even though it is nonsense. This metaphor is useful to explain what Chomsky means when he refers to UG as a “set of constraints”. A newborn baby has the potential to speak any of a number of languages, depending on what country it is born in. But it will not just speak them any way it likes. It will adopt certain preferred, innate structures. They are not things that babies and children learn. But they are rather things that happen to them. Just as babies naturally develop arms and not wings while they are still in the womb, once they are born they naturally learn to speak, and not to chirp or neigh.

The idea of UG is supported by creole languages because certain features are shared by virtually all of these languages. Creoles are languages that are developed and formed when different societies come together and are forced to devise their own system of communication. The system used by the original speakers is typically an inconsistent mix of vocabulary items known as a pidgin. As these speakers' children begin to acquire their first language, they use the pidgin input to effectively create their own original language, known as a creole. Unlike pidgins, creoles have native speakers and make use of a full grammar.

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