Theories of Noam Chomsky and language acquisition . LAD T.G Competence and Performance

1. LECTURE
NOAM CHOMSKY
HIS WORK IN LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE
.
PROF. JUNAIDAMJED
junaidamjed@gmail.com
http://facebook.com/junaid.amjed

2. NOAM CHOMSKY December 7, 1928
Prof. Junaid Amjed 2
Noam Chomsky was born December 7,
1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,
cognitive scientist, historian, logician,
social critic, and political activist. He is also
sometimes, described as "the father of modern
linguistics“. Chomsky is also a major figure in
analytic philosophy, and one of the founders of
the field of cognitive science. He has spent more than half a century at the
Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT), where he is Institute Professor and is
the author of over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass
media.

3. GRAMMAR
Prof. Junaid Amjed 3
It is meaningless to say that such and such language does not have any grammar.
Now look at the following two sentences of English.
1) I went home.
2)Went home I.
Such arrangement or order of lexical items (words) is known as syntax. And some rule
in our brain tells that the correct order is sentence 1 and not in sentence 2. Your mind can
only help you about it when you are a native speaker of English or know English well. Our
brain needs some rules or principles.These rules process words and parts of words to
produce speech (utterances) or writing (sentences). Chomsky is mainly interested in these
rules and principles and feels that we can understand how the mind actually works if we
can find out how it produces language.This means that Chomsky`s approach to language
is mentalist.

4. TRANSFORMATIONAL GENRATIVE
GRAMMAR
Prof. Junaid Amjed 4
Any language whether English or Urdu or Hindi or any other language you can
think of, was made up of a number of well formed sentences.These sentences could
be infinitive since it is possible to keep making new sentences.
According to Chomsky his grammar is generative because it can generate infinite
number of sentences. It is called transformational since a basic or simple sentence
can be transformed into a number of with same meaning.
For Example :
• I read the book.
Can be transformed either with same meaning:
•The book is being read by me.
Or with different meanings:
• Do I read the book?
• I read the book don’t I ?
• I do not read the book.
And so on…

5. Prof. Junaid Amjed 5
What we have done is that we transformed the basic sentence by adding words,
deleting words and above all by movement of words (Paradigmatic V/s Syntagmatic) .These
changes are called transformational rules.Thus grammar generates and
transforms sentences. It can therefor be called ~
TRANFORMATIONAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR _ TG for short.
DEEP SURFACE STRUCTURE
A Deep structure is underlying form of a sentence (in mind) before application of
rules.
After application of rules the result of phonetic form which is ready to speak is known
as Surface structure.
For example if you see , a dog bites a cat. Deep structure
in your mind
The cat was bitten by a dog. The utterance is
surface structure.

6. COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE
Prof. Junaid Amjed 6
Saussorian school of linguistics says that language is acquired by society as he
used the term LANGUE AND PAROLE.
Noam Chomsky believed that native speaker of a language , however carry the
grammar of their language in their minds.They know the structure of there
knowledge. Now some how this is very near to the sociolinguistic approach.
Chomsky distinguished the underlying knowledge of language from th language
actually used in practice. According to Chomsky language performance may be
effected by the following things
•memory • stamina • attentionetc.
Therefor the theory of language should be competence when the competence
started to develop the performance of language took place.
Both COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE are cognitive abilities.

7. COMPITANCE AND PERFORMANCE
Prof. Junaid Amjed 7
• Competence is a person`s subconscious linguistic ability to create and understand
sentences including to sentences they never heard before.
• Competence is a person`s acquisition with a set of grammatical rules including
components such as semantics, phonology, morphology, syntax etc.
Competence enables native speaker to recognize ambiguous sentences.
AND
• Performance is the real world linguistic output.
• Performance is the spoken medium or the utilization competence and it may
carry speech errors.
Competence is the speaker/hearer`s knowledge of his/her language. And
Performance is the actual usage of language in concrete situations.
(Chomsky 1965:4)

8. LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE (LAD)
Prof. Junaid Amjed 8
We have been talking about rules and principles and competence etc. what actually these
are? And where they are in a human body? Lets try to find out.
Remember that producing a sentence in a language can be
compared to the process of getting result out of a computer.The
computer is programmed and arranges according to the instructions
given to it. It is equipped to process information in a certain way. Sup-
-pose the human brain too has some device which can help it to
process language, what would it do?This device which Chomsky
called the language acquisition device or LAD for short would have
the capacity to arrange the lexical units of any human language acco-
-rding to the same general universal principles.Then there will be
variation according to the language which we are using.

9. Prof. Junaid Amjed 9
• Supposed to be an Organ of brain
• Intractable complexity of language acquisition
• Assumed Components
• technique for representing input signals
• a way of representing structural information about
them
• some initial definition of the class of possible
language structure hypotheses
• a method for determining meaning of hypotheses
for each sentence
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

10. Prof. Junaid Amjed 10
• Steps
• Input signals --> structural information
• Checks the compatibility of input with the
hypothesis
• Checks the compatibility using knowledge of
implications for each hypothesis
• One hypothesis or ‘grammar’ is selected as being
compatible with the input signals.
• This grammar provides the device with a method of
interpreting sentences

11. CONCLUSION
Prof. Junaid Amjed 11
• Humans do have a better biological evolved body for
language
• Certain traits such as sound processing are innate to
infants
• Children learn language remarkably fast
• Interesting patterns are present in child language
acquisition process
• Various theories have been proposed
Sources
www.wikipedia.org pandora.cii.wwu.edu Language Acquisition, Michel Frank