miércoles, 2 de diciembre de 2015

nativistis






Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker defend the idea that the languages is an innate faculty of the humans beings, and we are born with a set of rules about language that are in our brain since we are born.


Steven Pinker (1997)  have the idea of:
“Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.” (Pg. 18)


Chomsky called two fundamental facts about language.


“First, virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe. Therefore a language cannot be a repertoire of responses; the brain must contain a recipe or program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words. That program may be called a mental grammar (not to be confused with pedagogical or stylistic "grammars," which are just guides to the etiquette of written prose).” (Pinker, 1997) (p. 22)


“The second fundamental fact is that children develop these complex grammars rapidly and without formal instruction and grow up to give consistent interpretations to novel sentence constructions that they have never before encountered. Therefore, he argued, children must innately be equipped with a plan common to the grammars of all languages, a Universal Grammar, that tells them how to distill the syntactic patterns out of the speech of their parents.” (Pinker, 1997)(p.22)


For Chomsky we have something in our brain that is called LAD (language acquisition device) that give us the faculty to develop language in an innate way. When the young child is exposed to a language, their LAD make it possible for them to set the parameters and deduce the grammatical principles, because the principles are innate. So we are born with a set of rules about language, refer to the UG (Universal Grammar)  this is the basis upon which all human language build (innate core) for understand the system of principles, conditions and rules that are elements or properties of  all humans languages.


Nativists also are based in the competence form of learning a language, this is the unconscious knowledge of our language, the capacity that is located in the mental property and we all have different degrees of competence.

This posture is also related to the generative grammar theory that is base in the competence theory, focus on the syntax and formal approach that the language have. The language is viewed as cognitive linguistics, referring as property of capacity of the human mind. Describe how a native uses the structure, internalist, abstract of a language.  



Bibliography:

Pinker, S. (1997). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. New York: Perennial (Harper Collins).


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