Noam Chomsky

1. Noam Chomsky « the father of modern Linguistics »

2. NoamChomsky’s life and influences…

3. Born: December 7, 1928 • Son of a professor of Hebrew • His father worked with medieval Hebrew grammar. Influenced Chomsky • Yiddish: parents’ 1st language • He was able to see first-hand how his parents, as immigrants, learned English, compared to how he learned English from his American peers as a child • Wife: also a linguist • PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, 1955 • Zellig Harris: a linguist who swayed Chomsky towards studying linguistics, when he was on the verge of dropping out of college. • MIT: became a professor in 1955; Has been a professor there for over 55 years • 1957: book Syntactic Structures • Began to develop his linguistic theories in his doctoral thesis; elaborated on these theories in his first book • Criticized U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power: controversy, death threats, receives police protection • Rarely at MIT now: travels, giving lectures

4. Whatconstitutesknowledge of language? Read on to find out about language according to Noam Chomsky…

5. « UniversalGrammar » • Knowledge (internal structure of the human mind)  problem of how this knowledge is acquired • Many people believe that Chomsky claims that language is innate and that there is a universal grammar. This is, in fact, an incorrect interpretation of Chomsky’s theory. • Universal grammar (UG) is a question of how language is acquired, based on universal principles of language. • He found, through his studies, that humans have a « language acquisition device » that other animals do not have. When exposed to language, a child will acquire that language where an animal will not. Thus, a language acquisition device (LAD), as Chomsky calls is, is simply the function of our mind or brain that allows us to transform exposure to a language into acquisition of grammar. • UG is what speakers know given that they are able to acquire any given language, which is to say, to represent a given grammar for their language. • Chomsky wrote that UG is « the system of principles condition, and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages…the essence of human language. » • Chomsky argues that the types of grammar that the child needs must be narrowly constrained by human biology. These innate constraints on grammar are what Chomsky refers to as universal grammar, or more commonly known as “language instinct.”

6. Structure-Dependency Knowledge of language requires dependance on the structural relationships within a sentence or phrase, instead of simply the sequence of words. These sentences have a heirarchy of structure. A sentence breaks down into a noun phrase and a verb phrase. These phrases further divide into smaller constituents (determiner, noun, verb, etc). By examining changes in a particular sentence (eg. active to passive form), one can see that the movement that takes place takes into account the structural relationships within the sentence, and not the linear order of words. Therefore structure-dependancy is a universal principle of language. In other words, structure-dependancy is used in all languages.

7. Structure-Dependency (cont) A tree diagram representing phrase structure analysis: • By examining sentence diagrams, one can see how the elements of a • sentence depend on its structure.

8. Language Acquisition Now that we’ve examined a few of Chomsky’s theories on knowledge of language, let’s take a look at how language is acquired, according to Chomsky.

9. First Language Acquisition • Chomsky developed a theory in opposition to B.F. Skinner, who argued very generally that language comes about as a result of external stimuli. • example: a child responds to an object which is acting as a stimulus, for example a doll, calling it « doll. » • Chomsky challenges this with the notion of creativity: if a child can regularly produce sentences they have never heard before, how could they be acting through stimuli?  Language is not controlled by stimuli.

10. Poverty of the stimulus • The source of language must be within the mind itself, because of the lack of data available to the learner (a poverty of stimulus) • The data within the stimulus are too meager to rationalize that knowledge is produced from them. • In other words, a child could not have acquired language from the relatively few samples of language available to the child. • This explains the complexity of our knowledge of language, as compared to the poverty of data at a learner’s disposal.

11. Second Language Acquisition • Grammatical explanation: one does not learn the grammatical structure of a second language through explicit explanation and instruction • grammar-teaching cannot explain how people know things in the L2 that they are not taught (innateness can be a factor in L2 learning)  for example, structure-dependency can sometimes be known without being taught • Is it possible to become fluent in a second language? • According to Chomsky, yes. But motivation plays a big factor. He once gave an example of his two children. He went to Italy once for a few months, and his young boy picked up the language without even trying. However, his older daughter, who was highly motivated to learn Italian, had to work hard at it. • Poverty of the stimulus does exist in a second language, according to Chomsky. • L2 learners can also potentially attain the kind of complex and subtle awareness of language which is attributed to UG in L1 learning. • One cannot truly teach language but can only present conditions for the learner to develop it in his or her own mind.

12. Sources Collins, John. Chomsky: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum Internation Publishing Group, 2008. Cook, V.J. and Mark Newson. Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction. Ed. 2. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1996. Jack, Gavin. “An Interview with Noam Chomsky.” Language and Intercultural Communication 6.1 (2006): 92-105.