Linguist Noam Choomsky, A Theory Of Language

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Our species has fine-tuned communication to a degree that is far more complex than any other species on Earth. What we call “language” is a system unique to us; no other animal has all of the qualities that constitute a language. According to Hockett, there are certain requirements that need to be met in order for a system of communication to be defined as a language. These requirements include: semanticity, arbitrariness, discreteness, displacement, productivity, and duality of patterning. While animals can use semanticity, (their utterances have meanings), and arbitrariness (no logical connection from signified to signifier), they lack the rest of these parameters, such as productivity: the ability to create utterances that have never …show more content…

While his predecessors took an empirical stance when it came to language, Chomsky was a rationalist, claiming that we have an innate sense of knowledge. This philosophy led him to create his theories of universal grammar, linguistic competence, deep structure via immediate constituent analysis, and generative grammar. A significant quantity of how we currently study linguistic originated from his findings. Universal grammar is arguably his greatest contribution to linguistics. Hand in hand with Chomsky’s rationalist approach, universal grammar is a set of rules common to all languages instinctively known by every human. We can find evidence of this in children’s speech. A study by Roger Brown on first language acquisition indicated that in general, children consistently introduce certain inflectional endings and function words into their lexicon in a specific order. If the empiricist paradigm were true, this phenomenon would not be so ubiquitous. Universal grammar, when applied to the sentence “the monkey ate the banana” would explain that in one way or another, this sentence is able to be communicated in all languages. This theory was certainly a departure from an empirical paradigm of language, that language is solely learned through …show more content…

When it comes to linguistic capabilities, other linguists were concerned with linguistic performance: the act of formulating utterances. On the other hand, Chomsky was interested in linguistic competence: the implicit knowledge of language that we all share. Linguistic competence and generative grammar, another theory of Chomsky’s, are very closely related in that they both involve no conscious effort. Simply put, generative grammar is our ability to create any utterance is due to the grammatical rules that comprise generative grammar. Any sentence we create in the moment, is exactly that, spontaneous. The grammatical rules enable us to create sentences that are infinitely long! This idea fits into universal grammar in that this is a quality of all

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