CHOMSKY’S VIEW ANDEVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE

PANPACIFIC UNIVERSITY NORTH PHILIPPINES

URDANETA CITY

INSTITUTE OF GRADUATE SCHOOL

Lecturer:

MARLY IBARRA VILLACRUSIS

Professor:

DR. MA. MARTHA MANNETTE A. MADRID

Language serves as a cornerstone for human cognition, yet much

about its evolution remains puzzling.

Few would argue the significance of language in the evolution of the human species. Language serves many critical functions within the human experience, from keeping us safe to social engagement. While communication certainly exists in other species, the depth and complexity of human language is second to none.

Although linguists and psychologists tend to agree about the importance of language, there is some disagreement about how language acquisition occurs. Are we born with a clean slate when it comes to language, or do we enter the world with a set of language skills ready to be put to use?

Noam Chomsky is known as one of the strongest and most prominent opponents of the idea that Darwinian natural selection alone can account for the evolution of language. As it is with Chomsky, many controversies rank not only about

what he actually said, but also about what people thought he said or meant with what he said. But since Chomsky often

expressed his skepticism about evolutionary explanations of language, this was taken as unquestionable fact by many

linguists

Many authors, adopting the approach of evolutionary psychology, believe that language has been shaped by natural selection. In their view, certain random genetic mutations were thus selected over many

thousands of years to provide certain individuals with a decisive adaptive advantage. Whether the

advantage that language provided was in co-ordinating hunting parties, warning of danger, or

communicating with sexual partners remains uncertain, however.

Chomsky and the Evolution of Language

Chomsky, for his part, does not see our linguistic faculties as having originated from any particular selective pressure, but rather as a sort of fortuitous accident. He bases this view, among other things, on studies which found that recursivity—the ability to embed one clause inside another, as in “the person who was singing yesterday had a lovely voice”—might be the only specifically human component of language. According to the authors of these studies, recursivity originally developed not to help us communicate, but rather to help us solve other problems connected, for example, with numerical quantification or social relations, and humans did not become capable of complex language until recursivity was linked with the other motor and perceptual abilities needed for this purpose. According to Chomsky and his colleagues, there is nothing to indicate that this linkage was achieved through natural selection. They believe that it might simply be the result of some other kind of neuronal reorganization.

During the first half of the 20th century, linguists who theorized about the human ability to speak did so from the behaviourist perspective that

prevailed at that time. They therefore held that language learning, like any other kind of learning, could be explained by a succession of trials, errors,

and rewards for success. In other words, children learned their mother tongue by simple imitation, listening to and repeating what adults said.

This view became radically questioned, however, by the American linguist Noam Chomsky. For Chomsky, acquiring language cannot be reduced to

simply developing an inventory of responses to stimuli, because every sentence that anyone produces can be a totally new combination of words.

When we speak, we combine a finite number of elements—the words of our language—to create an infinite number of larger structures—

sentences.

CHOMSKY’S VIEW OF THE LANGUAGE

In Chomsky’s view, the reason that children so easily master the complex

operations of language is that they have innate knowledge of certain principles that guide them in developing the grammar of their language. In other words, Chomsky’s

theory is that language learning is facilitated by a predisposition that our

brains have for certain structures of language.

But what about language?

For Chomsky’s theory to hold true, all of the languages in the world must share certain structural

properties. And indeed, Chomsky and other generative linguists like him have shown that the

5000 to 6000 languages in the world, despite their very different grammars, do share a set of syntactic rules and principles. These linguists believe that this

“universal grammar” is innate and is embedded somewhere in the neuronal circuitry of the human brain. And that would be 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.

Chomsky believed that language is innate, or in other words, we are born with a capacity for language. Language rules are influenced by experience and learning, but the capacity for language itself exists with or without environmental influences. Chomsky believed that language is so complex, with an unlimited combination of sounds, words, and phrases, that environmental learning is not able to account for language acquisition alone. It would take a lifetime to teach someone all of the rules of language, but even small children can understand them. Chomsky believed that the human brain comes into the world with a pre-determined set of rules for how language works. Environment and learning are involved, but the foundation for language comes with us from the womb.

Noam Chomsky postulated that the mechanism of the language acquisition is derived from the innate processes. Innate is something which is already there in mind since birth. The theory proposed by Chomsky is proved by the children living in same linguistic community. Moreover, they are not influenced by the external experiences which bring about the comparable grammar. He thus proposed his theory on language acquisition in 1977 as "all children share the same internal constraints which characterize narrowly the grammar they are going to construct." He also proposed that all of us live in a biological world, and according to him, mental world is no exception. He also believes that as there are stages of development for other parts of the body, language development can also be achieved up to a certain age.

Observations that Support the Chomskyian View of Language

Until Chomsky propounded his theory of universal grammar in the 1960s, the

empiricist school that had dominated thinking about language since the

Enlightenment held that when children came into the world, their minds were like a blank slate. Chomsky’s theory had the impact of a

large rock thrown into this previously tranquil, undisturbed pond of empiricism.

Subsequent research in the cognitive sciences, which combined the tools of psychology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy, soon lent further support to the theory of universal grammar. For example, researchers found that babies only a few days old could distinguish the phonemes of any language and seemed to have an innate mechanism for processing the sounds of the human voice.

Thus, from birth, children would appear to have certain linguistic abilities that predispose them not only to acquire a complex language, but even to create one from whole cloth if the situation requires. One example of such a situation dates back to the time of plantations and slavery. On many plantations, the slaves came from many different places and so had different mother tongues. They therefore developed what are known as pidgin languages to communicate with one another. (Pidgin languages are not languages in the true sense, because they employ words so chaotically—there is tremendous variation in word order, and very little grammar.) But these slaves’ children, though exposed to these pidgins at the age when children normally acquire their first language, were not content to merely imitate them. Instead, the children spontaneously introduced grammatical complexity into their speech, thus in the space of one generation creating new languages, known as creoles.

Based on the Chomky’s view and evolution of language, it is believed that we humans are born with a predisposition to learn language and with the basic rules for language intact. Though many specific language structures are heavily influenced by the environment, according to Chomsky, the human brain is ready made to quickly acquire language at specific stages in the developmental process.

With regards to the evolution of language, Chomsky has not given much importance to the development of language. Mostly because he cannot imagine how the evolution of language came about.

We must take Chomsky’s point of view with a grain of salt, just because he does not have a strong theory about the evolution of language does not mean that learning it is not important. The difficulty of understanding the evolution of language should not be an indictment on its’ importance rather it could be more of an indictment of our own intelligence. The evolution of language is complicated and still one of the great mysteries of the world. It may have been a random mutation without any clear advantages, but we still do not know. To better understand ourselves we must continue develop theories and research the evolution of language, because language is what separates us from other animals.

Impact, Strengths and Weaknesses of Chomsky's Approach to Language Acquisition

Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best known and influential linguist of the second half of the Twentieth Century. He has made a number of claims about language in particular, he

suggests that language is an innate discipline in that we are born with a set of rules about language in our heads which he refers to as the 'Universal Grammar'. The

universal grammar is the basis upon which all human languages build. In Chomsky's early work, this takes the form of an innate structure called the Language Acquisition

Device (LAD). Psychologists have produced several accounts of infant language acquisition, which differ in their underlying theoretical perspectives. Behavioral

perspectives in Language acquisition identified a sequence in language development. Skinner (1957) argued that language was learned by the child through the process of operant conditioning, a process of stimulus-response where a result occurs as a

consequence of actions and that the environment in which a child lives reinforces behavior.

Chomsky argued that Skinner's theory implied that children learn entirely through trial and error, that they try out possible utterances which they adopt if approved and reject if they do not. He argued that children acquire language in such a short space of

time, acquiring complex grammatical rules and extensive vocabulary that would not have been possible through a trial and error system. Chomsky proposed that the child has a language acquisition device (LAD) which is an inherent mechanism allowing the

child to hear the spoken language around it to reveal the basic principles of the language.

In 1983, J Bruner brought together the two previous perspectives on Language acquisition to form the Interactionist Perspective, which consisted of the two elements, cognitive and social interaction between the child and the environment. He argued that parents provide their children with a language acquisition support system (LASS) which

is a collection of strategies that parents use to facilitate their children's acquisition of language.

WEAKNESSES:

A study of a child born to deaf parents.

This child was surrounded by language in the form of television and radio but received no spoken language or LASS from his parents. The child only succeeded in acquiring language

once he was referred to a speak therapist. As soon as the child received the social interaction of language he developed very quickly.

This disproved Chomsky's views on the biological perspective. Although there have been many critics of Chomsky, many of his views have appeared in later research into the

interactionist perspective.

STRENGHTS:The focus of attention on features of languages common to all languages is one of the

strengths of Chomsky's approach, the idea of universal grammar. The theory that a child does not simply copy the language that they hear around them, they deduce rules from it, which they can then use to create sentences that they have never heard before. Many studies of child directed speech, research undertaken by Catherine Snow (1979), show that speech to young children is slow, clear, grammatical and repetitious, supporting the work of Chomsky

that children are able to learn without the social interaction.

Sources:

Chomsky, Noam 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures. Cambridge, Mass. / London, England: MIT Press (Current Studies in

Linguistics Series 16).

evolutionoflanguage.blogspot.com/2010/12

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky

www.brighteducation.com

Sharedsymbolicstorage.blogspot.com/2008/02/language _evolution_i_noam_chomsky.html

http://www.chomsky.info