Noam Chomsky - The Structure of Language

there are good many people specialist in the field as you know who believe that language is simply a matter of training that that a child can be trained to speak and that there's nothing unique about this UI no finger lit there's something more than simply training why do you feel that there's something more to learning language than simply training well first of all it's it's worth mentioning that most overwhelmingly people learn language without training I mean if you simply immerse a child in a situation which language is spoken he acquires the system but instead but is more than a response to the stimuli of most person around him speaking well the most obvious and sort of gross fact about language which shows that I think is the innovative creative character of it and every child is capable of the understanding and producing very complex structures which have no simple relationship no point-by-point relationship no no relationship on the basis of analogy let's say so you may experience that he's pretty generative creative structures of language just that that you can as we're talking we say new things which we may not have said before we hear new language as well as we talk there's right other repetition and what we say well if you really were to to see how little repetition there is you can let's say take a book or a newspaper or a library for that matter and search for repetitions of phrases or sentences and so on they write they occur but rarely so there are particular sub parts of language they read greetings or conventional utterances of one sort or another that do repeat frequently but these are incidentally often marginal in their structure for example a sentence like how do you do has a structure which is in fact unique it's not the structure of any English sentence the and we don't create new sentences of that type that's just a ritualized uttering yeah but most of our linguistic interchange is in fact highly innovative and of course it's not just random I mean it's innovative but somehow appropriate to situations it doesn't necessarily follow the rules that we're all talking school of a subject in a predicate or a noun and a verb I mean I would have the impression that somehow in my schooling I was taught to do what it is that I do now people have the impression but the reason is that the actual rules of language which certainly are not taught in school because in fact nobody even knows them through this they are totally unconscious I mean what you're taught in school is some relatively superficial set of generalizations about some of the products but important is it important to know that well I think it'd be important to know it but the the point that has to be stressed is that one first of all that everyone knows you know speaks a language very fluently and very rich language before ever goes to school and furthermore even if you wanted to teach somebody the rules of language you wouldn't be able to do it because the rules are largely unknown we're just barely beginning to discover them it seems to us that there's no problem in speaking just as it seems to us that there's no problem in what say walking but if we were to try to design an automaton let's say that would walk or ride a bicycle or identify a person I mean for example you look at me from one point of view and if I turn my face you can still recognize yeah that's not so easy to do I mean we can do it because we have some special unknown capacities for a perceptual identification well in case of language too we have this whole totally unconscious set of intricate mechanisms made something's built into them to the system well I have no doubt that most of the richness of the structure of language is just a biological property the organism can't be current can't be taught any more than you can be taught EFT which it doesn't do they've got no way that you can x-ray it or or well put your finger on it at the moment their physiology is not in a state where one can detect the physical structures that underlie linguistic use I mean only rather gross things are known for example it's known that that language is controlled by the Dhamma that the brain has two hemispheres and language is controlled by one dominant hemisphere incidentally humans are as far as I know that's right anyone knows the only organism that has lateralization that has specialization of the two hemispheres and apes don't for example and this is as is well known this is closely connected with language that and you know areas of the brain are known that have special relevance to various language functions but when you get into the detailed intricate structure of the system it's still mystery tire mystery one might say the same about learning nobody knows anything about the neurology learning either for them now one of the most controversial things that you've come up with is the fact that what you're saying is true not only of English but true of all languages the commonality that runs through all languages I would have guessed that some languages we're so rigidly structured that if you learned a set of 20 rules that would take care of all situations well see if what I just said before is true that is if a great deal of the structure of language is just the biological property that you bring to the learning situation not something that you acquire in it and if we further assume as is unquestionably the case that humans are not specifically adapted to learn one language or another that is there's no racial difference that makes it easier to free learn this language of that language or something of that sort from those two assumptions alone it follows that all languages are going to be essentially uniform in that part of their structure which is biologically determined just as there's a there only gonna be certain possible limitations in the kind of gate that you can use when you walk you can't fly you know I know human beings on a flight world on a walk we may walk in slightly different ways and these may be culturally determined in part and so on well I don't press the analogy to fly there's more differentiation in language than that but still I think that there is simply a biologically determined rich framework which we can learn a lot about incidentally I think we can find out a good deal about it and there are interesting theories about it that predispose us to acquire a system of great complexity of a very specific sort on the basis of a very slight familiarity very slight exposure to data one of the most remarkable things about acquisition language is that Whitledge the child or for that matter an adult has had very few seconds in his lifetime and very and the total range of data available to him is not as small as compared with the with his ability to express himself and to produce and understand sentences and utterances and discourses as he does in his normal life and that again indicates that that there's a rich biologically determined structure which therefore must be uniform across languages not as far to get back to your original point you know whether there are languages with a small number of rules that would suffice to explain everything certainly nothing of that sort is known I mean - insofar as languages have been carefully studied living languages at least they seem basically - they do differ one language is not another language but they don't differ differ as far as we know it was created I suspect in all languages that is so that's absolutely that's not just a human property I mean which is true of every language

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 177,124

Rating: 4.9570642 out of 5

Keywords: language, epistemology, philosophy of mind, chomsky, creativity, biology, linguistics

Id: E3U6MsdBalg

Length: 7min 12sec (432 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2016