Chomskyan arguments for innate language ideas and the inadequacy of those arguments

1. Chomsky’s faculties of the mind and UG

According to Chomsky, humans are born with minds that contain innate knowledge concerning a
number of different areas. One such area or faculty of the mind concerns language. The set of innate
language ideas that comprises the language faculty is called ‘Universal Grammar’, UG for short.This UG
is universal because every human being is born with it; it is further universal because with it any
particular language of the world can be acquired. Thus, UG is not a grammar of any particular language
but it contains the essentials with which any particular grammar can be acquired.

Some aspects of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar For Chomsky, Universal Grammar is defined as the core
grammar containing the principles and parameters that apply to all languages. The other aspects of the
grammar of any particular language are referred to as ‘peripheral grammar’ and a ‘mental lexicon’.
These must be learned separately from UG because the peripheral grammar and the lexicon are not
universal but are specific to particular languages. Thus, presumably the example of ‘do Support’ for
negation in English would not be handled by UG but by the peripheral grammar of English. Whether
intelligence is to account for the learning of such an aspect of grammar is something that, in our
reading, Chomsky does not consider worth theorizing about. Instead he is focused on the matter of
setting the switches of parameters that ‘can bevfixed by quite simple evidence’.

2 Chomsky’s arguments for Universal Grammar

Let us now consider some of the major arguments that Chomsky presents in support of his UG theory.
The arguments and the emphasis he places on each have changed as he has revised his theory of
grammar over the years. We will present objections to his four main continuing arguments plus adding a
new objection to the dispute.

4 of Chomsky Argument :

(1) Degenerate, meagre, and minute language input;

(2) Ease and speed of child language acquisition; and

(3) The irrelevance of intelligence in language learning. Our additional objection to UG will be

(4) Simultaneous multilinguals and the problem of multiple settings on a single parameter

acquisition of a well-formed grammar of the language, despite their being exposed to inadequate
language data, is evidence of the assistance of innate language ideas. The language data, insists, consist,
‘in large measure, of sentences that deviate in form from the idealized structures defined by the
grammar that he [the child] develops’. These data are a ‘minute sample of the linguistic material that
has been thoroughly mastered’. Such inadequate data would necessarily result in an inadequate
grammar, if one accepted the Empiricist point of view.

2: Ease and speed of child language acquisition

Mere exposure to the language, for a remarkably short period, seems to be all that the normal child
requires to develop the competence of the native speaker.’ Since, according to Chomsky, the child’s
remarkable accomplishment in acquiring the grammar could not have been through an accumulation of
language learning that the child would have had to experience if one were postulating an Empiricist-
based acquisition process, this phenomenon could only have occurred with the assistance of the
Universal Grammar. It is through the help of innate language ideas that the acquisition of language is
made so easy and rapid. Chomsky’s claim is, thus, that the Empiricist cannot account for such ease and
speed of acquisition.

3: The irrelevance of intelligence in language learning

In his conception of faculties of the mind, Chomsky has contended that language learning is essentially
independent of intelligence. In support of this thesis, he argues that because grammar has a peculiar
form (his own formulation of a grammar!) and it is not a logical form, hence, it is not a direct function of
a rational operating intelligence, but must be a function of innate language knowledge.

English is a head-first language while Japanese is a head-last language. Now, each parameter can be set
either head first or head last. Suppose, then, we have a child being raised in an English–Japanese
bilingual household where the child receives both English and Japanese language input simultaneously
from birth. Let us say the mother speaks Japanese and the father speaks English. It is commonly
observed that in such a situation the child learns these two different languages without any special
difficulty and is fluently bilingual by the age of 4 or 5 years.

Emergentism is based on the view that certain higher-level properties, in particular consciousness and
intentionality, are emergent in the sense that although they appear only when certain physical
conditions occur, such properties are neither explainable nor predictable in terms of their underlying
physical properties. The properties of mind are genuinely novel and bring into the world their own
causal powers. Thus, mind may have some control over behaviour, which is in accord with the most
commonplace of human observations. It is thus highly likely that we are born with a brain that has
inherent in it physical properties that allow for the development of intellectual processing powers. Such
powers would be able to process environmental input from the physical world and yield all manner of
intellectual objects including language and mathematics. This commonsense kind of
philosophy/psychology is one that we favour and would like to see more fully developed along more
contemporary lines in the coming years.