The innateness debate unfortunately complicates our discussions unnecessarily. Innateness is one of those terms, like "deep structure", that seems to invite over-interpretation and unconstrained metaphorical extension. While I agree with pretty much everything Bob has said in response to Eduard's comments, I come down on Sampson's side in the debate. I think he's made a much stronger case than Pinker or Chomsky. But in saying this, I'm merely kicking innateness up a level, from language to cognition in general. My problem with a narrower Innateness Hypothesis is that I have yet to see a putative linguistic universal that can be shown to be strictly linguistic and not the product of something more broadly cognitive. It's a debate in which the strong position, the linguistic innatist position, is severely underdetermined by the data. By the way, I say this as one who was trained rigorously in the generative grammar of the late 60s.
But none of this is really relevant to the debate. The fact is that all humans, with a very few unfortunate exceptions, master language very quickly on the basis of inadequate input. And it is the case that languages are alike in curious and astonishing ways. The Keenan-Comrie Noun Phrase Accessability Hierarchy works amazingly well across languages. Japanese, a SOV language, and English, a SVO language, have mirror-image gapping patterns. Hungarian, which can have either word order, gaps either like Japanese or like English, depending on which word order is present.
The real problem is the misunderstanding of "knowledge of language". The fact that a five year old can say and comprehend sentences of remarkable complexity and rarely make a syntax error requires a knowledge of language. This knowledge does not have to be articulated by its possessor; it need merely be executed. The fact that a five-year-old cannot apply the label "noun" accurately to words in a list is simply not relevant. That five year old uses nouns as nouns are to be used, not as prepositions, conjunctions, or something else.
We need to separate our grammar debates from this acquired knowledge, in Krashen's sense, and focus on the questions of what explicit knowledge about language is useful for people to know, what benefits are to be gained in cognitive and intellectual maturation from studying the rigorous descriptive system that the pedagogical grammar is, and how we can help people to think clearly about language, using demonstrably valid and useful linguistic categories and constructs.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Robert Yates
Sent: Sun 9/3/2006 3:02 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: On innate knowledge of language
Eduard has an interesting challenge.
>>> [log in to unmask] 09/03/06 7:46 AM >>>
Please, be so kind and provide the bibliographical information which
includes research that shows evidence that children "know
(unconsciously) what a noun [ or other part of speech] is." I haven't
found yet such evidence in all the language literature I have read.
***
If children did not know what nouns are unconsciously we might expect
all kinds of "errors" around nouns. For example, we might have the
articles in very strange position, we might have the plural "s" attached
to words that can't be pluralized, we might expect comparative and
superlative morphology attached to nouns, we might expect scrambled word
order in apparently noun phrases.
I don't know of ANY research that shows children's confusion with
respect to nouns or any category. Perhaps, Eduard could share us the
evidence that kids don't know what nouns are.
Pinker, in The Language Instinct, notes that there is no child data with
the following kinds of errors for yes-no questions. (See the Chapter
Baby Born Talking, p. 276 in my edition for this discussion)
He is smiling -- Does he be smiling?
She could go. Does she could go?
If you teach ESL, you have heard such examples in the questions of ESL
students. Why is it kids learning English understand how "do" works for
questions and adult L2 learners can have very different principles? If
language principles are not innate, we should expect some kids to have
"wild" grammars with respect to this property of the English auxiliary
system.
Of course, there is PUBLISHED evidence that meets Eduard's challenge.
One example is summarized in Pinker (Chapter 5, pages 129 +). (I have
not read the actual paper). It is work by Peter Gordon with compound
nouns. Notice the following property with compound nouns. In the
compound, irregular plurals are possible; regular plurals aren't.
1a) purple people eater
b) purple baby eater
c) *purple babies eater
2 a) cookie monster
b) *cookies monster (What kind of monster would only eat ONE
cookie?)
3) a) rat catcher
b) *rats catcher
Actually, if I had a lot of rats in my house (in other words, it was
rat-infested, but not *rats-infested) I would want all of the rats
caught, not just one.
Gordon tested this contraint on compound structures on three and five
year old kids with questions like the following:
Experimenter: Here is a monster who eats mud. What do you call him?
Kid: A mud-eater.
Experimenter: Here is a monster who eats mice. What do you call him?
Kid: A mice-eater.
And, the crucial question is the following:
Experimenter: Here is a monster who eats rats. What do you call him?
According to Pinker, Gordon found that his 3 and 5 year old kids all
responded: A rat-eater.
Think about the kind of knowledge a kid needs to have to recognize that
even though irregular plurals can be used in such compounds but regular
plurals can't. And, remember the immediate INPUT.
What do you call a monster that eats RATS? The input in this question
would favor *"rats-eater."
I have no idea what the story is if kids don't know what a noun is and
the different properties of IRREGULAR and REGULAR nouns.
Perhaps, Eduard will let us know.
Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University
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