4. Language Origin
Chomsky’s faculties of the mind and Universal Grammar
According to Chomsky, humans are born with minds that contain innate knowledge concerning a number of different areas. One such area or faculty of the mind concerns language. The set of innate language ideas that com- prises the language faculty is called ‘Universal Grammar’, UG for short. This UG is universal because every human being is born with it; it is fur- ther universal because with it any particular language of the world can be acquired. Thus, UG is not a grammar of any particular language but it contains the essentials with which any particular grammar can be acquired. This contention is one basis for Chomsky’s oft-repeated assertion that lan- guage acquisition is independent of intelligence and logic and that animals do not have language because they are not born with UG (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, 2002).
The role of experience
It is important to note that Universal Grammar does not become functional or operational unless a person receives certain speech input from the environ- ment. Thus, for example, given English sentences as input, UG will construct a grammar of English in the child’s mind. The acquisition of a particular grammar therefore involves the interaction of UG with experiences of the world. The role of language experience is to activate UG so that it can develop the grammatical essentials of a particular grammar. These essentials involve certain principles and parameters which are universal. (They are discussed more fully in the next section.)
Such a view differs from the view of Empiricists who place a greater role on experience, which is the provider of ideas. Yet modern Empiricists like Putnam and Piaget also postulate some sort of processor in dealing with
1 See Pinker and Bloom (1990, pp. 707–84) for an attempt to show that Universal Grammar could have been developed by a neo-Darwinian process. Others too debate this question in the same issue of Behavioural and Brain Sciences. We think that all of this is a nice exercise. But why speculate on the evolutionary origins of the Universal Grammar when there is no con- vincing evidence for its very existence!
raw experience, i.e. intelligence. The abstract operations involved in the cre- ation of a negative sentence in English, for example, cannot be explained by the simple experience of raw speech. According to the Empiricist, abstract rules are created on the basis of speech data (strings of physical sounds appearing in the environment through the operation of intelligence). It is intelligence that enables the child to process and construct all kinds of ideas, be they for language, mathematics, or playing games.
Some aspects of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar
For Chomsky, Universal Grammar is defined as the core grammar con- taining the principles and parameters that apply to all languages. The other aspects of the grammar of any particular language are referred to as ‘peripheral grammar’ and a ‘mental lexicon’. These must be learned separ- ately from UG because the peripheral grammar and the lexicon are not universal but are specific to particular languages. Thus, presumably the example of ‘do Support’ for negation in English would not be handled by UG but by the peripheral grammar of English. Whether intelligence is to account for the learning of such an aspect of grammar is something that, in our reading, Chomsky does not consider worth theorizing about. Instead he is focused on the matter of setting the switches of parameters that ‘can be fixed by quite simple evidence’ (Chomsky, 1986, p. 146). ‘The environment determines the way the parameters of universal grammar are set, yielding different languages’ (Chomsky, 1988, pp. 133–4).
Thus, according to Chomsky (1986, p. 150), what children know innately
are ideas concerning (1) the principles of the various subsystems of Universal Grammar, (2) the manner of their interactions, and (3) the parameters associated with these principles. The precise content of these various UG categories is not provided by Chomsky.