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1、When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the human essence, the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man. Noam Chomsky, Language and MindSo the obvious hypothesis is that our language is the result of the unfolding of a genetically determi
2、ned program.Noam Chomsky, Interview to KBS TV, Kyoto, JapanLanguage serves essentially for the expression of thought.Noam Chomsky, Language and ResponsibilityIn my opinion one should not speak of a relationship between linguistics and psychology, because linguistics is part of psychology.Noam Chomsk
3、y, Language and ResponsibilityThe child, placed in a linguistic community, is presented with a set of sentences that is limited and often imperfect, fragmented, and so on. In spite of this, in a very short time he succeeds in constructing, in internalizing the grammar of his language, developing kno
4、wledge that is very complex, . Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility1.CHOMSKY, Noam. American linguist and political writer born on Dec. 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Avram Noam Chomsky was introduced to linguistics by his father, a Hebrew scholar who worked with historical linguistics.
5、 Noam studied at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a doctoral degree in linguistics in 1955, and then he began teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where today he is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.To find the principles common to all langu
6、ages that enable people to speak creatively and freely is Noam Chomskys description of his goal as a linguist. Many recent works have stressed that all children go through the same stages of language development regardless of the language they are learning. In examining this, Chomsky gave linguistic
7、s, the study of the human speech, a new direction.Knowing a language means being able to produce an infinite number of sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before. Chomsky refers to this ability as the creative aspect of language.His first book, Syntactic Structures,
8、 published in 1957, outlines his system of transformational grammar. This grammar consists of surface structures - the sounds and words in a sentence - and deep structures that contain the meaning of the sentence. The meaning is converted by a transformation - any of an ordered set of rules - to a s
9、urface structure. Chomsky says that children are born with a knowledge of the principles of the grammatical structure of all languages, and this inborn knowledge explains the success and speed with which they learn language.2. Chomsky changed the direction of linguistics away from empiricism and tow
10、ards rationalism in a remarkably short space of time. In doing so he apparently invalidated the corpus as a source of evidence in linguistic enquiry. Chomsky suggested that the corpus could never be a useful tool for the linguist, as the linguist must seek to model language competence rather than pe
11、rformance.Competence is best described as our tacit, internalised knowledge of a language.Performance is external evidence of language competence, and is usage on particular occasions when, crucially, factors other than our linguistic competence may affect its form.Competence both explains and chara
12、cterises a speakers knowledge of a language. Performance, however, is a poor mirror of competence. For examples, factors diverse as short term memory limitations or whether or not we have been drinking can alter how we speak on any particular occasion. This brings us to the nub of Chomskys initial c
13、riticism: a corpus is by its very nature a collection of externalised utterances - it is performance data and is therefore a poor guide to modelling linguistic competence.Further to that, if we are unable to measure linguistic competence, how do we determine from any given utterance what are linguis
14、tically relevant performance phenomena? This is a crucial question, for without an answer to this, we are not sure that what we are discovering is directly relevant to linguistics. We may easily be commenting on the effects of drink on speech production without knowing it.However, this was not the o
15、nly criticism that Chomsky had of the early corpus linguistics approach.3. Universal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans (linguistic nativism). It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describ
16、e specific languages. Universal grammar proposes a set of rules intended to explain language acquisition in child development.Some students of universal grammar study a variety of grammars to abstract generalizations called linguistic universals, often in the form of If X holds true, then Y occurs. These have been extended to a range of traits, from the phonemes found in languages, to what word orders languages choose, to why children exhibit certain linguistic behaviors.The
