Noam Chomsky is known for arguing that language is innate rather than learned through environmental influences alone. He believes humans are born with a universal grammar that guides language acquisition. While experience plays a role, the underlying capacity and rules for language exist independently. Chomsky argues natural selection cannot fully explain language's complexity and that its evolution may have been accidental. His views have significantly influenced the field of linguistics but have also faced criticism for downplaying the role of environmental learning and not providing a strong theory of language's evolution.

1. CHOMSKY’S VIEW AND
EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE
PANPACIFIC UNIVERSITY NORTH PHILIPPINES
URDANETA CITY
INSTITUTE OF GRADUATE SCHOOL
Lecturer:
MARLY IBARRA VILLACRUSIS
Professor:
DR. MA. MARTHA MANNETTE A. MADRID

2. Language serves as a cornerstone
for human cognition, yet much
about its evolution remains
puzzling.
Few would argue the significance of language in the
evolution of the human species. Language serves many critical
functions within the human experience, from keeping us safe
to social engagement. While communication certainly exists in
other species, the depth and complexity of human language is
second to none.
Although linguists and psychologists tend to agree about the
importance of language, there is some disagreement about
how language acquisition occurs. Are we born with a clean
slate when it comes to language, or do we enter the world
with a set of language skills ready to be put to use?

3. Noam Chomsky is known as one of the strongest and
most prominent opponents of the idea that Darwinian natural
selection alone can account for the evolution of language. As
it is with Chomsky, many controversies rank not only about
what he actually said, but also about what people thought he
said or meant with what he said. But since Chomsky often
expressed his skepticism about evolutionary explanations of
language, this was taken as unquestionable fact by many
linguists

4. Chomsky and the Evolution of Language
Many authors, adopting the approach of evolutionary
psychology, believe that language has been shaped
by natural selection. In their view, certain random
genetic mutations were thus selected over many
thousands of years to provide certain individuals with
a decisive adaptive advantage. Whether the
advantage that language provided was in co-ordinating
hunting parties, warning of danger, or
communicating with sexual partners remains
uncertain, however.

5. Chomsky, for his part, does not see our linguistic faculties as
having originated from any particular selective pressure, but
rather as a sort of fortuitous accident. He bases this view, among
other things, on studies which found that recursivity—the ability
to embed one clause inside another, as in “the person who was
singing yesterday had a lovely voice”—might be the only
specifically human component of language. According to the
authors of these studies, recursivity originally developed not to
help us communicate, but rather to help us solve other problems
connected, for example, with numerical quantification or social
relations, and humans did not become capable of complex
language until recursivity was linked with the other motor and
perceptual abilities needed for this purpose. According to
Chomsky and his colleagues, there is nothing to indicate that this
linkage was achieved through natural selection. They believe that
it might simply be the result of some other kind of neuronal
reorganization.

6. CHOMSKY’S VIEW OF THE LANGUAGE
During the first half of the 20th century, linguists who theorized about the
human ability to speak did so from the behaviourist perspective that
prevailed at that time. They therefore held that language learning, like any
other kind of learning, could be explained by a succession of trials, errors,
and rewards for success. In other words, children learned their mother
tongue by simple imitation, listening to and repeating what adults said.
This view became radically questioned, however, by the American linguist
Noam Chomsky. For Chomsky, acquiring language cannot be reduced to
simply developing an inventory of responses to stimuli, because every
sentence that anyone produces can be a totally new combination of words.
When we speak, we combine a finite number of elements—the words of
our language—to create an infinite number of larger structures—
sentences.

7. In Chomsky’s view, the reason that
children so easily master the complex
operations of language is that they have
innate knowledge of certain principles that
guide them in developing the grammar of
their language. In other words, Chomsky’s
theory is that language learning is
facilitated by a predisposition that our
brains have for certain structures of
language.

8. But what about language?
For Chomsky’s theory to hold true, all of the
languages in the world must share certain structural
properties. And indeed, Chomsky and other
generative linguists like him have shown that the
5000 to 6000 languages in the world, despite their
very different grammars, do share a set of syntactic
rules and principles. These linguists believe that this
“universal grammar” is innate and is embedded
somewhere in the neuronal circuitry of the human
brain. And that would be why children can select,
from all the sentences that come to their minds, only
those that conform to a “deep structure” encoded in
the brain’s circuits.

9. Chomsky believed that language is innate, or in other
words, we are born with a capacity for language. Language
rules are influenced by experience and learning, but the
capacity for language itself exists with or without
environmental influences. Chomsky believed that language is
so complex, with an unlimited combination of sounds, words,
and phrases, that environmental learning is not able to account
for language acquisition alone. It would take a lifetime to teach
someone all of the rules of language, but even small children
can understand them. Chomsky believed that the human brain
comes into the world with a pre-determined set of rules for
how language works. Environment and learning are involved,
but the foundation for language comes with us from the
womb.

10. Noam Chomsky postulated that the mechanism of the language
acquisition is derived from the innate processes. Innate is
something which is already there in mind since birth. The
theory proposed by Chomsky is proved by the children living in
same linguistic community. Moreover, they are not influenced
by the external experiences which bring about the comparable
grammar. He thus proposed his theory on language acquisition
in 1977 as "all children share the same internal constraints
which characterize narrowly the grammar they are going to
construct." He also proposed that all of us live in a biological
world, and according to him, mental world is no exception. He
also believes that as there are stages of development for other
parts of the body, language development can also be achieved
up to a certain age.

11. Observations that Support the
Chomskyian View of Language
Until Chomsky propounded his theory of
universal grammar in the 1960s, the
empiricist school that had dominated
thinking about language since the
Enlightenment held that when children came
into the world, their minds were like a blank
slate. Chomsky’s theory had the impact of a
large rock thrown into this previously
tranquil, undisturbed pond of empiricism.

12. Subsequent research in the cognitive
sciences, which combined the tools of
psychology, linguistics, computer science,
and philosophy, soon lent further support
to the theory of universal grammar. For
example, researchers found that babies
only a few days old could distinguish the
phonemes of any language and seemed to
have an innate mechanism for processing
the sounds of the human voice.

13. Thus, from birth, children would appear to have certain
linguistic abilities that predispose them not only to acquire a
complex language, but even to create one from whole cloth if
the situation requires. One example of such a situation dates
back to the time of plantations and slavery. On many
plantations, the slaves came from many different places and so
had different mother tongues. They therefore developed what
are known as pidgin languages to communicate with one
another. (Pidgin languages are not languages in the true sense,
because they employ words so chaotically—there is tremendous
variation in word order, and very little grammar.) But these
slaves’ children, though exposed to these pidgins at the age
when children normally acquire their first language, were not
content to merely imitate them. Instead, the children
spontaneously introduced grammatical complexity into their
speech, thus in the space of one generation creating new
languages, known as creoles.

14. Impact, Strengths and Weaknesses of Chomsky's Approach
to Language Acquisition
Based on the Chomky’s view and evolution of language, it is believed
that we humans are born with a predisposition to learn language and with the
basic rules for language intact. Though many specific language structures are
heavily influenced by the environment, according to Chomsky, the human brain
is ready made to quickly acquire language at specific stages in the
developmental process.
With regards to the evolution of language, Chomsky has not given
much importance to the development of language. Mostly because he cannot
imagine how the evolution of language came about.
We must take Chomsky’s point of view with a grain of salt, just
because he does not have a strong theory about the evolution of language
does not mean that learning it is not important. The difficulty of understanding
the evolution of language should not be an indictment on its’ importance
rather it could be more of an indictment of our own intelligence. The evolution
of language is complicated and still one of the great mysteries of the world. It
may have been a random mutation without any clear advantages, but we still
do not know. To better understand ourselves we must continue develop
theories and research the evolution of language, because language is what
separates us from other animals.

15. Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best known and influential linguist of the second half of
the Twentieth Century. He has made a number of claims about language in particular, he
suggests that language is an innate discipline in that we are born with a set of rules
about language in our heads which he refers to as the 'Universal Grammar'. The
universal grammar is the basis upon which all human languages build. In Chomsky's
early work, this takes the form of an innate structure called the Language Acquisition
Device (LAD). Psychologists have produced several accounts of infant language
acquisition, which differ in their underlying theoretical perspectives. Behavioral
perspectives in Language acquisition identified a sequence in language development.
Skinner (1957) argued that language was learned by the child through the process of
operant conditioning, a process of stimulus-response where a result occurs as a
consequence of actions and that the environment in which a child lives reinforces
behavior.
Chomsky argued that Skinner's theory implied that children learn entirely through
trial and error, that they try out possible utterances which they adopt if approved and
reject if they do not. He argued that children acquire language in such a short space of
time, acquiring complex grammatical rules and extensive vocabulary that would not
have been possible through a trial and error system. Chomsky proposed that the child
has a language acquisition device (LAD) which is an inherent mechanism allowing the
child to hear the spoken language around it to reveal the basic principles of the
language.
In 1983, J Bruner brought together the two previous perspectives on Language
acquisition to form the Interactionist Perspective, which consisted of the two elements,
cognitive and social interaction between the child and the environment. He argued that
parents provide their children with a language acquisition support system (LASS) which
is a collection of strategies that parents use to facilitate their children's acquisition of
language.

16. WEAKNESSES:
A study of a child born to deaf parents.
This child was surrounded by language in the form of television and radio but received no
spoken language or LASS from his parents. The child only succeeded in acquiring language
once he was referred to a speak therapist. As soon as the child received the social interaction
of language he developed very quickly.
This disproved Chomsky's views on the biological perspective. Although there have been
many critics of Chomsky, many of his views have appeared in later research into the
interactionist perspective.
STRENGHTS:
The focus of attention on features of languages common to all languages is one of the
strengths of Chomsky's approach, the idea of universal grammar. The theory that a child does
not simply copy the language that they hear around them, they deduce rules from it, which
they can then use to create sentences that they have never heard before. Many studies of
child directed speech, research undertaken by Catherine Snow (1979), show that speech to
young children is slow, clear, grammatical and repetitious, supporting the work of Chomsky
that children are able to learn without the social interaction.

17. Sources:
Chomsky, Noam 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua
Lectures. Cambridge, Mass. / London, England: MIT Press (Current Studies in
Linguistics Series 16).
evolutionoflanguage.blogspot.com/2010/12
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
www.brighteducation.com
Sharedsymbolicstorage.blogspot.com/2008/02/language
_evolution_i_noam_chomsky.html
http://www.chomsky.info