There does appear to be some language-specific knowledge that we have at birth, knowledge of the prosodics of our mother's tongue. While the subtleties of consonant and vowel acoustics don't pass through skin, subcutaneous fat, muscle, amniotic fluid, and other tissues, changes in loudness, pitch, and duration appear to. There is observational and experimental evidence that neonates already have some productive and receptive knowledge of intonation, stress, and rhythm. This is, however, not innate, because it differs from language to language. It's learned from the time the fetus's hearing begins to function.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: December 9, 2008 5:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Mixed construction (was A short note on...)
Just to chime in on Herb's point a bit (and apologies in advance to Herb if I'm mischiming) --
In at least one of the generative models, UG was viewed as specifying (among other things) that children were born expecting that there would be at least two distinct lexical classes that serve as heads of phrases (this was to reflect the observation that all languages seem to have something like a noun/verb distinction, but without entailing that there was some kind of *semantic* universality to nouns and verbs). One of the fundamental statements about the structure of sentences was (is?) that they have two parts, and each part is a projection of something different (a sentence cannot, for example, be "noun phrase + noun phrase" by default; it has to be "NP + VP," etc.). The *order* of the two parts varies from language to language, as does the degree to which the order is fixed, but the claim is that that binary split exists in all languages. This position entails that the child doesn't have to "deduce" the lexical split from input; s/he arrives expecting one, and simply has to figure out which actual words go in which category.
That kind of stipulation is rather obviously internal to Language-with-a-capital-L. Innate knowledge of lexical categories isn't innate knowledge of, say, the entrée/dessert distinction. Opposing theories attempt to account for the universality, or near-universality, of the noun/verb distinction by appealing to a mix of general processing strategies and perceptual constraints (e.g. short-term memory constraints favor a message design in which old information is regularly repeated so that it won't be lost; old information is positioned as "static" since it's *not* what's focused on, and words for objects (the prototypical noun) refer to comparatively static phenomena, leading to a conflation between "old information" and "the class of words that includes words for objects").
We still, alas, have no licensed telepaths able to scan the thought processes of one-year-olds, so it's difficult to "prove" either of those positions.
Sincerely,
Bill Spruiell
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2008 4:31 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Mixed construction (was A short note on...)
Chomsky posited a Language Acquisition Device as a "mental organ." It was that that made rapid acquisition possible. As the theory of Universal Grammar began to take shape, it was seen as fleshing out the LAD. Chomsky's position was that we are genetically endowed not just with a capacity for language learning, something that most cognitivists would agree with, but rather with a knowledge of Language, not of a specific language but of the principles by which all human language operates. One of the best recent presentations of the innatist view is Mark Baker's The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar (Basic Books 2002).
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Patricia Lafayllve [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: December 9, 2008 10:22 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Mixed construction (was A short note on...)
Janet asks a good question, and one I have been wracking my brain around...
My assumption has always been that language is innate, and the potential to
acquire grammar is *(probably)* innate, but that grammar in and of itself
needs to be learned...
Or am I remembering all that wrong? *wink* It is possible!
-patty
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Castilleja, Janet
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2008 6:47 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Mixed construction (was A short note on...)
Just out of curiosity, did Chomsky ever actually say that grammar was
innate? Or did he say the potential to acquire grammar was innate?
Wouldn't that be a very different thing?
Janet Castilleja
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