Chomsky

ON THE NATURE, USE AND ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE

NOAM CHOMSKY

· Biography
Chomsky, Noam (1928- ), American linguist, professor and political activist, licensed by the University of Pennsylvania. He is considered the founder of the Generative Grammar, an original system to approach the linguistic analysis and that it has revolutionized linguistics.

His moreimportant linguistic publications are: Syntactic Structures (1957), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), The Sound Pattern of English (1968; with Morris Halle), Thoughts and Language (1972), The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and Reflections on Language (both of the year 1975).

• Structure of the text

What he does at first is to delimit the aspects of the study of linguisticsthat he is going to develop later. In this work / book he tries to explain as much as he can questions concerning the nature and origin of knowledge. His manner of doing it is presenting the ideas followed by linguistics in the last years and then he exposes his point of view. He places his work in the context of the natural sciences. He approaches problems of the mind by methods of rational inquirybecause the investigation cannot be based only in observable data. Linguistics is linked to other disciplines such as psychology… Science has formulated its principles because science is based on observation and experimentation, so linguistics has to be explained in scientific principles. Chomsky tries to propose a linguistic theory.

In the title of the article the theme is anticipatedbecause what he tries to explain is the nature, use and acquisition of language and, in his opinion, the important object of linguistics is to investigate the nature of the mind, so is the concern of the cognitive revolution in contrast with the behaviourist approach.

The next phase of the work is that of establishing a linguistic frame along history in relation with the theory he is goingto propose. He makes a review of the central ideas of the cognitive revolution, whose main principles were developed before by other linguists, mainly in the 17th century.

At first he refers to Descartes, who argued that "the mind forms ideas that provide a conception of the objects of the external world" and of whom Chomsky thought he was right. On the other side are the empiricists, ofwhom Chomsky thought they were wrong. Others that seem to be on the right way are the 17th-18th century philosophers such as W. von Humboldt for whom language was a system that made infinite use of finite means. But the earliest origin of these ideas is in Socrates, when he demonstrated that the human mind incorporated some kind of innate knowledge.

For the study of language, Chomskyrecognizes four big problems from the point of view of the cognitive revolution, revolution of the 50's that abandons the barren dogmas and applies classical ideas. The four problems are:

-To define what is knowledge of language (the generative grammar makes a theory of the language).

-To explain how is the knowledge used.

-To find the physical mechanisms ofthe brain involved in the use of the language.

-Acquisition of language.

Chomsky approaches these 4 problems from at abstract level.

The next thing Chomsky does is to expose one of the central ideas of the text that it is the process of learning language. It is said that this faculty is genetically transmitted and that it is unique in the human species and that itis as follows: language has an initial state that later can mature and that beginning early in life, the mind of a child acquires knowledge of the language spoken in his community. All this process happens in an unaware way. If the enviroment is good (ex: democracy), the stimulus will be favorable for the learning, a learning that is internalized, represented in the main of the child. This is...