_006 Chomsky & Grammar

You can teach a parrot to say almost any phrase, but you cannot teach it to make up a phrase by itself. Humans are different. Pick any five words at random and try to use them to make a sentence. It is likely that you have just spoken a phrase that nobody has ever said before and it is most likely nonsense, but is grammatically correct.

Chomsky is a 20^th Century American philosopher and linguist who suggested that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. He was responding to behavioural psychologists such as BF Skinner who claimed that people learn everything through their interaction with the environment. The view at the time was that humans are taught language and that language was created as a social construct.

Chomsky refuted this notion; language is not acquired through teaching nor is it “learned” in the traditional sense of the word at all. Instead, it is grown in the mind, just like an organ is grown in the body. We are pre-programmed for communication through language – human brains have an LAD (Language Acquisition Device), which is a mechanism that allows children to develop language.

That is not to say that language is an entirely built-in tool. Chomsky states that humans share a universal grammar, which is a by-product of evolution (accompanied by increased brain size). We share a genetically transmitted “initial state” whereby we are all capable of creating language for ourselves, a trait which we do not share with animals. However the specifics of a language are brought about through experience, hence why Spanish and English have different words. But structurally, these two languages are fundamentally similar and all language is subject to this boundary placed by our LAD.

So why does any of this matter? Well there are philosophical implications of this theory regarding the acquisition of meaning. Simply put, because we have this rigid biological structure inside us which gives us our language, we are limited in what we can express and what we can understand through language. There are ideas and truths out there which we will never be able to say due to the constraints of our LAD. There are questions we will never be able to ask, and answers that we will never be able to give because it is just not within us to be able to do so.

But Chomsky does not hold such a pessimistic view; rather he celebrates the LAD for all that it actually can give us. He describes it as a rich cognitive system which affords us in many ways a universal meaning through which we can share thoughts, ideas and experiences. It would be much more difficult to do so if Skinner was right and we merely reflected our environment and could only gain language through imitation of others. Perhaps we do have a narrow and distorted perception of the world due to this linguistic mechanism, but without it none of this would make sense.

Word Count:497

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures, The Hague : Mouton.