Innateness, Universal Grammar, and Emergentism (original) (raw)
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The case for emergentism is reconsidered with regards to two points. First, it is argued that the need for certain types of innate concepts does not necessarily count as evidence for Universal Grammar, as all approaches to cognition recognize the existence of innately guided learning of some sort. Second, it is argued that there is a significant place for frequency in explanatory work on language but that its effects are modulated by an efficiency-driven processor. #
The innateness hypothesis and grammatical relations
Synthese, 1973
Noam Chomsky's work in linguistic theory has had a revolutionary impact on the study of language. Probably the most controversial of Chomsky's claims (and certainly the one which has received the most attention from scholars in disciplines other than linguistics) is that human beings are genetically endowed with a highly structured language learning mechanism, knowledge of which will also provide knowledge about the scope and limits of the human mind. This claim is referred to as the 'Innateness Hypothesis', and Chomsky bases it on the apparent incompatibility of two well-established facts: (i) that natural languages are immensely complex structurally-so much so that nobody has ever succeeded in writing a complete grammar of any one of them (i.e., a set of rules which will specify precisely which strings of words are wellformed sentences); and (ii) that all normal children master their native tongues in a remarkably short period (generally aggreed to be no more than four years) with little or no formal instruction. Chomsky has suggested in various places that reconciling these facts is "the fundamental empirical problem of linguistics" (Chomsky, 1971). The Innateness Hypothesis makes it possible to solve this problem by positing that many of the complex features of natural languages are not learned by the child, but rather reflect the structure of the innate language learning apparatus. That is to say, any structural properties of languages which are manifestations of the structure of the innate language learning mechanisms are not themselves learned. Hence, what the child actually learns in acquiring a language may in fact be far less than it at first seems. It follows from this account of (i) and (ii) that there must be numerous structural properties common to all natural languages. Since any normal child will acquire the language to which he or she is exposed, we can assume that all humans have identical innate language learning mech
Language patterns and innateness
The question whether and to what extent language should be regarded as an innate endowment of the human brain or the result of (ontogenetically) environmental stimulus and (phylogenetically) historical development is still open. The paper proposes some evidence, strictly linguistic in nature, against the widespread idea that the acquisition of language features from the stimulus available to the child should be impossible without an innate Universal Grammar working as a Language Acquisition Device already present in the brain at birth. It also evaluates in a methodological perspective the two main paths of explanation for the presence of linguistic features in our competence, namely their being encoded in a brain module and their being acquired from experience, concluding that -on epistemological grounds -the latter has to be preferred.
New perspectives on language development and the innateness of grammatical knowledge
Language Sciences, 2005
Chomsky (1965, 1986) presents a series of arguments for an innate syntactic component of the language faculty. Do the arguments proposed at that time still stand, or have they been overridden by newer proposals? The current paper emphasizes three research directions among the most recent advances in cognitive science. These directions lead to alternate proposals to the generative linguistic theory of language development. First, the 'item-based' theory of language development, which stresses that development of language knowledge goes from specific to general and is compatible with developing research in cognitive linguistics. Second, the apparent uniformity of adult linguistic competence, which is a fundamental tenet of generative linguistics theory, may be the product of literate cultures but not of invariants of the brain, as attested by the fundamental differences found between spoken and written language. Third, artificial neural networks provide evidence against the necessity to call on algebraic rules to explain language performance and this, in turn, argues in favor of the emergence approach and of the dynamic systems approach to language development. All this calls for a renewal of language development theories and for a separation between statistical, non-algebraic, non-conscious, item-based, and usage-based structures and processes dedicated to spoken language (and to automatized written language processes), and principle-and-rule-governed, algebraic structures and processes dedicated to conscious written or formal spoken language.
The Emergence of Grammar from Perspective
The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking, 2005
One of the key questions in cognitive psychology is how people represent knowledge about concepts such as football or love. Recently, some researchers have proposed that concepts are represented in human memory by the sensorimotor systems that underlie interaction with the outside world. These theories represent a recent development in cognitive science to view cognition no longer in terms of abstract information processing, but in terms of perception and action. In other words, cognition is grounded in embodied experiences. Studies show that sensory perception and motor actions support human understanding of words and object concepts. Moreover, even understanding of abstract and emotion concepts can be shown to rely on more concrete, embodied experiences. Finally, language itself can be shown to be grounded in sensorimotor processes. This book brings together theoretical arguments and empirical evidence from several key researchers in this field to support this framework.
Précis of Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2003
The goal of this study is to reintegrate the theory of generative grammar into the cognitive sciences. Generative grammar was right to focus on the child's acquisition of language as its central problem, leading to the hypothesis of an innate Universal Grammar. However, generative grammar was mistaken in assuming that the syntactic component is the sole course of combinatoriality, and that everything else is "interpretive." The proper approach is a parallel architecture, in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are autonomous generative systems linked by interface components. The parallel architecture leads to an integration within linguistics, and to a far better integration with the rest of cognitive neuroscience. It fits naturally into the larger architecture of the mind/brain and permits a properly mentalistic theory of semantics. It results in a view of linguistic performance in which the rules of grammar are directly involved in processing. Finally, it leads to a natural account of the incremental evolution of the language capacity.