Laurie Bauer - WordPress.com — Get a Free Blog Here

55 CHOMSKY’S INFLUENCE
if, at some later stage, they wish to learn the language of their biological parents.
So what is universal to humans is the ability, in the appropriate conditions, to
learn a language, any language. If we accept the points made in the last section,
though, children will not be given enough input to allow them to construct the
linguistic system of English or Sierra Miwok for themselves. Thus, the argument
runs, they must have, at birth, certain specifically linguistic expectations
in order for them to develop a language from the impoverished data they will
actually be provided with. This set of expectations or pre-programmed knowledge
is Universal Grammar (often abbreviated as UG). If linguists knew the
contents of UG, they would be able to work out how children learn languages
so quickly, and how languages must pattern in order to fulfil the requirements
of UG, and thus why a particular descriptively adequate grammar might be
better than another descriptively adequate grammar of the same language.
Unfortunately, UG is not available for perusal, and its form must be deduced
from the actual languages we can observe. We can see the main thrust of the
Chomskyan research enterprise as being the uncovering of UG on the basis of
data from natural languages.
References
Bauer, Laurie (2001). Morphological Productivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Chomsky, Noam (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague and Paris: Mouton.
Chomsky, Noam (1964). Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. The Hague and Paris:
Mouton.
Chomsky, Noam (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam (1991). Linguistics and adjacent fields: a personal view. In Kasher
(ed.), 3–25.
Everett, Daniel L. (2006). Biology and language. Journal of Linguistics 42: 385–93.
Gazdar, Gerald, Ewan Klein, Geoffrey Pullum & Ivan Sag (1985). Generalized Phrase
Structure Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Householder, F. W. (1966). Phonological theory: a brief comment. Journal of
Linguistics 2: 99-100.
Kasher, Asa (ed.) (1991). The Chomskyan Turn. Cambridge MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
Lightner, Theodore M. (1983). Introduction to English Derivational Morphology.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Lyons, John (1968). Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lyons, John (1991). Chomsky. 3rd edn. London: Fontana.
McCawley, James D. (1971). Where do noun phrases come from? In Danny D. Steinberg
& Leon A. Jakobovits (eds), Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
217–31.