Johanna,
Thanks for giving Patty a much more coherent answer than I did. I
especially like your final summary of the debate. I don't think
Sampson's Educating Eve is quite as effective rhetorically as Pinker's
books, but I think he's closer to what's going on. Terrence Deacon's
The Symbolic Species is also excellent, but a pretty challenging read.
I rather like the notion of language as an entity defined by cognition
that has evolved to be maximally learnable, ruling out all sorts of
languages that were less learnable. The statistics of language typology
suggest that, as with species, the less efficient are also less likely
to survive.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Johanna Rubba
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 2:05 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: On innate knowledge of language
Patty,
To help clarify your question about "rules", you need to distinguish
between two kinds of knowledge - ability to do something complex
without having to think through the steps, vs. the ability to describe
how something is done. With regard to language, this is often described
as the difference between being able to _talk_ (speak and understand
language automatically) and being about to _talk ABOUT_ language.
Everyone who has normal language ability (and that is nearly everyone)
in whatever language has the first kind of "knowledge", which I prefer
to think of as "ability". The second kind, conscious knowledge of the
definitions of terms like "subject", or the ability to identify the
direct object of a sentence and call it that, has to be consciously
learned, either by self-teaching from books or experimentation or by
being taught by someone else.
Both kinds of knowledge consist of rules: the word "rule" in
linguistics doesn't refer so much to a "do-don't" type rule, like rules
of etiquette, but rather just a fixed pattern for creating a certain
linguistic element, like a sentence or a phrase. In English, the verb
usually comes between the subject and other material in the sentence;
in Japanese, the verb is always at the end of the sentence, with the
subject first, and things like direct objects in between.
I often explain it this way: think of a swimming coach explaining to a
trainee how to execute an efficient stroke. The coach is talking
_about_ swimming, not doing it. When you chuck an infant into deep
water and it swims (and they do, up to a certain age), it is using its
unconscious ability to swim. The kid can't talk at all yet, let alone
talk _about_ anything, and nobody taught it to swim. It is operating by
instinct. There is something instinctual about language learning; what
linguists are arguing about is the degree to which language has
instincts (and, literally, brain parts) reserved only for it, which
dictate which structures are possible in language, or whether
more-general cognitive abilities (such as the ability to generalize
over a range of similar experiences, or to switch between having an
object in the foreground and in the background, like the "faces/vase"
diagrams) are used to develop knowledge of language.
Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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