The document discusses the innateness hypothesis, which claims that human language ability is specialized and works independently from other mental abilities. It became popular after Chomsky started looking for evidence of our unique language abilities. In 1957, Chomsky introduced phrase structure rules in his book Syntactic Structures. These rules described sentence structure as combinations of noun phrases and verb phrases, marking the beginning of generative grammar theory.

1. Phrase Structure Rules 1957 -65

2. • How do children learn languages so quickly?
• Isn’t there too much information?
• Why does it get more difficult after a certain
time?

3. Innateness hypothesis

4. Be careful!
• What does the Innateness Hypothesis claim?
• We are innately better at learning languages
than animals.
• Nobody disagrees with this.

5. We are innately superior to animals at
languages
• Nobody disagrees with that
• Nobody has EVER disagreed with it
• Never in history
• That’s NOT the innateness hypothesis!

6. OK, so what IS the INNATENESS
hypothesis?
• Human language ability is SPECIAL PURPOSE
• It is separate from other mental abilities
• It works INDEPENDENTLY from other mental
abilities
• The skills involved in language ability are
UNIQUE to language
• Ordinary mental ability is NOT involved in
language ability

7. • Anyway, the Innateness Hypothesis became
very popular
• Chomsky started looking for evidence of how
our unique language ability works

8. 1957, Syntactic Structures

9. Phrase Structure Rules

10. Phrase Structure Rules weren’t new

11. But now we were taking them REALLY
seriously!

12. We are going to discover something
new about our brains!!

13. In 1957, it was still pretty simple

15. S -> NP + VP

16. S -> NP + VP

17. S -> NP + VP

18. S – NP + VP

19. S -> NP + VP

20. VP -> Verb + NP

21. VP -> Verb (+ NP)

22. VP -> V + NP

23. VP -> V (+ NP)

24. VP -> V (+ Adv P)

25. NP -> Det + N

26. NP -> Det + N

27. NP -> Det + N

28. NP -> Det + N

29. Verb -> Aux + V

30. Why is aux BEFORE the verb?

31. It’s walk-ed NOT –ed walk

32. Well look at this!

33. Aux seems to come before the verb!

34. Maybe there’s some funny invisible
movement!?!

35. See! It’s not THAT crazy!

36. Is it?

37. Anyway …

38. We are starting to see …

39. Funny invisible movement

40. Keeping the same structure

41. Universal grammar

42. By moving things around