UG in SLA.ppt

Chapter 5 The UG Approach to Language Acquisition Introduction The rise of generative linguistics, associated with the name of Noam Chomsky, represented a radical shift from behavior or the products of behavior to states of the mind/brain that enter into behavior (Chomsky 1986:3), a change of perspective from behaviourism, which dominated the social sciences in the 1950s, to mentalism, which understands talk about the mind to be talk about the brain at an abstract level at which [...]principles can be formulated that enter into successful and insightful explanation of linguistic (and other) phenomena that are provided by observation and experiment (Chomsky, 1987:50) To put it into another, generative linguistics represented a shift from behaviourim to mentalism. The Cartesian idea: Language = a mirror of the mind There is a specific faculty of the mind/brain that can account for the acquisition and use of language. behaviorism (Knowledge of) language=(Knowledge of ) a set of habits, dispositions and abilities The study of language acquisition is reduced to the study of input-output relations. Generativism The child is equipped with a LAD, which is responsible for the speed with which humans acquire language as well as for their linguistic creativity. A set of principles and parameters that constrain all human language. UG is part of the human genetic endowment and is encoded in the Language Acquisition Faculty (LAF). LAF is An innate component of the human mind that yields a particular through interaction with presented experience, a device that converts eperience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language. (Chomsky 1986) The three basic questions 1) what constitutes knowledge of language? (Humboldts problem) 2) How is knowledge of language acquired? (Platos problem) 3) How is knowledge of language put to use? (Descartes problem) A principle of UG is a statement that is true for all human languages. e.g. The pr