乔姆斯基的普遍语法

乔姆斯基的普遍语法理论

保定学院 刘丽娟

摘要:本文阐述了乔姆斯基的普遍语法理论的产生背景、理论来源和主要内容，并在此基础上从语言习得的角度着重探讨了普遍语法理论的核心思想。本文从语言习得的定义,引出三种理论布龙菲尔德的行为主义理论,乔姆斯基的天赋假说和交互模式.在探讨过程中，乔姆斯基对其他行为主义的批判.虽然乔姆斯基的天赋假说一直处于不断的调整和更新中,但始终是一种假设性的理论,仍无得到很好的验证.

关键词:乔姆斯基,普遍语法,语言习得装置,心理学,语言学,交互主义，行为主义

Abstract: with a brief introduction of the theoretical background and content of Chomsky Theory of UG,this dissertation emphatically examines the major assumptions of the theory concerning language acquisition 。This paper discussing from the definition of LA,lead to the three theories a behaviourist view ,an innatist view ,an interactionist view.It is of epoch-making significance that Chomsky’s critique of other stimulus-reinforcement theory demonstrates a breakthrough against the behaviorist doctrine which has governed American psychology for nearly half a century。So far，however，the theory of UG is considered were hypothetic assumptions resting on no evidence and exiguously actual speculation ，though it is still under revision today。

Key words : Chomsky,universal grammar，language acquisition device，psychology，linguistic， interactionist，behaviourisst.

Introduction：Language acquisition is a important field inlinguistic。Over half of the century，researchers introduced many theories,such as , a behaviorist view of language acquisition (Skinners) , an innatist view of language acquisition (Chomsky) , an interactionist view of language acquisition .but what is the language acquisition？Language acquisition refers to the child’s acquisition of his mother tongue, i.e. how the child comes to understand and speak the language of his community. Children all over the world learn to speak at about the same time unless they are isolated during the critical acquisition years or unless they suffer from extreme external deficiency 。How do children accomplish this? What enable children to learn words and string them together into meaningful sentences ？What facilitie children to develop the grammatical system of their language？What help them to achieve the communicative competence using the language to express their various needs ？All these have been attracting the time and efforts of linguists ,psycholinguists，psychologists.generally speaking ,there are mainly three theories concerning how language is learned ，namely the behaviorist ，the innatist,the interactionist views .

Traditional behaviorists view language as behavior and believe that language learning is simply a matter of imitation and habit formation. Imitation à Recognition à Reinforcement.the chief exponent of the behaviourist view is B.FSkinner. this view was prevalent before the 1960s ,after that it was under challenge and criticism for its deficiencies discovered later. The inadequacy of behaviorist view lies in explaining how children acquire complex language system. The merits of it offers a reasonable account of how children acquire some of the regular and routine aspects of the language . An Innatist view of language

acquisition Noam Chomsky claims that human beings are biologically programmed for language and that the language develops in the child just as other biological functions such as walking.This innate ability is called Language Acquisition Device (LAD) by Chomsky. An interactionist view of language acquisition .The interactionist view holds that language develops as a result of the complex interplay between the human characteristics of the child and the environment in which the child develops. Integrated with the innatist view, the interactionist further claims that the modified language which is suitable for the child’s capability is crucial in his language acquisition. (motherese). In summary, in behaviorist approach, language environment plays a major role in providing both language models to be imitated and necessary feedbacks.The innatist view emphasizes more on children’s internal processing of the language items to be learnt. The environment functions as a stimulus that triggers and activates the pre-equipped UG to process the materials provided by the linguistic environment around the children.The interactionist view calls for the quality of the language samples available in the linguistic environment, only when the language is modified and adjusted to the level of children’s comprehension, do they process and internalize the language items. But in this dissemination ，we mainly talk about the innatist view.

Introduction of Chomsky

Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His undergraduate and graduate years were spent at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his PhD in linguistics in 1955. During the years

1951 to 1955, Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. While a Junior Fellow he completed his doctoral dissertation entitled, \"Transformational Analysis.\" The major theoretical viewpoints of the dissertation appeared in the monograph Syntactic Structure, which was published in 1957. This formed part of a more extensive work, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, circulated in mimeograph in 1955 and published in 1975.Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.) From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics. In 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor.

During the years 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, NJ. In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford; in January 1970 he delivered the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at Cambridge University; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, and in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, among many others.

Professor Chomsky has received honorary degrees from University of London, University of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, Swarthmore College, Delhi University, Bard College, University of Massachusetts, University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Amherst College, Cambridge University, University of Buenos Aires, McGill University, Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Tarragona, Columbia University, University of Connecticut, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, University of Western Ontario, University of Toronto, Harvard University, University of Calcutta,

and Universidad Nacional De Colombia. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others.

Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. His works include: Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; Cartesian Linguistics; Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle); Language and Mind; American Power and the New Mandarins; At War with Asia; For Reasons of State; Peace in the Middle East?; Reflections on Language; The Political Economy of Human Rights, Vol. I and II (with E.S. Herman); Rules and Representations; Lectures on Government and Binding; Towards a New Cold War; Radical Priorities; Fateful Triangle; Knowledge of Language; Turning the Tide; Pirates and Emperors; On Power and Ideology; Language and Problems of Knowledge; The Culture of Terrorism; Manufacturing Consent (with E.S. Herman); Necessary Illusions; Deterring Democracy; Year 501; Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War and US Political Culture; Letters from Lexington; World Orders, Old and New; The Minimalist Program; Powers and Prospects; The Common Good; Profit Over People; The New Military Humanism; New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind; Rogue States; A New Generation Draws the Line; 9-11; and Understanding Power. His major works： Syntactic Structures, 1957 ，On Certain Formal Properties of

Grammars, 1959 ，On the Notion ‘ Rule of Grammar ’, 1961 ，Explanatory Models in Linguistics, 1962，Introduction to the Formal Analysis of Natural Languages, 1963 ，Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965 ，Cartesian Linguistics, 1966 ，Language and Mind, 1968 ，Deep Structure, Surface Structure and Semantic Interpretation, 1970 ，Conditions on Transformation, 1971

The source of the Chomsky’s theory

The idea of a universal grammar can be traced to Roger Bacon's observation that all languages are built upon a common grammar, substantially the same in all languages, even though it may undergo accidental variations, and the 13th century speculative grammarians who, following Bacon, postulated universal rules underlying all grammars. The concept of a universal grammar or language was at the core of the 17th century projects for philosophical languages. There is a Scottish school of universal grammarians from the 18th century, to be distinguished from the philosophical language project, and including authors such as James Beattie, Hugh Blair, James Burnett, James Harris, and Adam Smith. The article on \"Grammar\" in the first edition of the Encyclop?dia Britannica (1771) contains an extensive section titled \"Of Universal Grammar.\"The idea rose to notability in modern linguistics with theorists such as Noam Chomsky and Richard Montague, developed in the 1950s to 1970s, as part of the \"Linguistics Wars\".

During the early 20th century, in contrast, language was usually understood from a behaviourist perspective, suggesting that language learning, like any other kind of learning, could be explained by a succession of trials, errors, and rewards

for success.[4] In other words, children learned their mother tongue by simple imitation, listening to and repeating what adults said.

The Innateness hypothesis

Universal grammar (UG) is a theory in linguistics, usually credited to Noam Chomsky, proposing that the ability to learn grammar is hard-wired into the brain.[1] The theory suggests that linguistic ability manifests itself without being taught (see Poverty of the stimulus), and that there are properties that all natural human languages share. It is a matter of observation and experimentation to determine precisely what abilities are innate and what properties are shared by all languages.

This approach is contextual, meaning that, although there are believed to be similarities among all languages, not all languages have the same grammar. It does not attempt to determine independent facts that hold true for every single language on Earth. These rules outline how human languages develop when faced with these basic principles, however. By combining the rules with observations about a language, linguists can often determine a language's word order, phonemes, and other foundational traits.

Poverty of Stimulus

One of the major assertions that underlies the theory of universal grammar is called the Poverty of Stimulus Argument. This claim states that children are not

exposed to enough stimulus — people speaking the native language — to be able to learn language correctly. There are a huge number of ways that words can be put together, and no rule for doing so is obviously more correct than any other. In addition, this argument states, children are usually given positive evidence for how to speak correctly, but rarely provided with negative evidence, or correction when they speak ungrammatically. Yet children, despite a relatively limited amount of input, do reliably learn the grammatical structures of their language. This, the argument asserts, must mean that there is some innate capacity for the structures of language.

This argument is very controversial, and has many critics. Some argue that the amount of stimulus that a child receives from listening to other speakers is actually enough information for him or her to learn the language's basic grammar, and that the brain can recognize patterns in the language to fill in what's missing. Others assert that children are corrected and are told when a sentence is grammatically incorrect, and the fact that they are rarely (or never) exposed to ungrammatical sentences teaches them that those grammatical structures are wrong.

The debeats

Chomsky has been known to vigorously defend and debate his views and opinions, in philosophy, linguistics (Linguistics Wars), and politics. He has had notable debates with Jean Piaget, Michel Foucault, William F. Buckley,Jr. George Lakoff, Richard Perle, Hilary Putnam, Willard Quine, and Alan Dershowitz, to name a few. The Guardian said of Chomsky's debating ability: \"His boldness and clarity

infuriates opponents – academe is crowded with critics who have made twerps of themselves taking him on.\" In response to his speaking style being criticized as boring, Chomsky said that \"I'm a boring speaker and I like it that way.... I doubt that people are attracted to whatever the persona is.... People are interested in the issues, and they're interested in the issues because they are important.\" \"We don't want to be swayed by superficial eloquence, by emotion and so on.

Contributions to linguistics

Syntactic Structures was a distillation of his book Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory(1955, 75) in which he introduces transformational grammars. The theory takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax which can be (largely) characterised by a formal grammar; in particular, a Context-free grammar extended with transformational rules. Children are hypothesised to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all human languages (i.e. they assume that any language which they encounter is of a certain restricted kind). This innate knowledge is often referred to as universal grammar. It is argued that modelling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the \"productivity\" of language: with a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms, humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including sentences no one has previously said.

Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers investigating the acquisition of language in children, though some researchers who work in this area today do not support Chomsky's theories, often advocating emergentist or

connectionist theories reducing language to an instance of general processing mechanisms in the brain.

Generative grammar

The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, though quite popular, has been challenged by many, especially those working outside the United States. Chomskyan syntactic analyses are often highly abstract, and are based heavily on careful investigation of the border between grammatical and ungrammatical constructs in a language. (Compare this to the so-called pathological cases that play a similarly important role in mathematics.) Such grammaticality judgments can only be made accurately by a native speaker, however, and thus for pragmatic reasons such linguists often focus on their own native languages or languages in which they are fluent, usually English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Japanese or one of the Chinese languages.

Sometimes generative grammar analyses break down when applied to languages which have not previously been studied, and many changes in generative grammar have occurred due to an increase in the number of languages analyzed. However, the claims made about linguistic universals have become stronger rather than weaker over time; for example, Richard Kayne's suggestion in the 1990s that all languages have an underlying Subject-Verb-Object word order would have seemed implausible in the 1960s.

Contributions to psychology

Chomsky's work in linguistics has had major implications for psychology and its fundamental direction in the 20th century. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how language is learned by children and what, exactly, is the ability to interpret language. Many of the more basic principles of this theory (though not necessarily the stronger claims made by the principles and parameters approach described above) are now generally accepted in some circles.

In 1959, Chomsky published a long-circulated critique of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, a book in which Skinner offered a speculative explanation of language in behavioral terms. \"Verbal behavior\" he defined as learned behavior which has its characteristic consequences being delivered through the learned behavior of others; this makes for a broad view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach differed considerably from most traditional views of language in that focused on the circumstances in which language was used; These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach, which focused on the mental representations of words and assumed a word, once learned, would appear in all functions. It should be noted that Chomsky's 1959 review has been severely criticized, the most famous (but far from only) criticism being that of Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1970 paper On Chomsky’s Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, volume 13, pages 83-99). This and similar reviews have noted important facts not generally

acknowledged outside of behavioral psychology, such as that Chomsky did not understand either behavioral psychology in general or how Skinner's radical behaviorism differed from other varieties, often making embarrassing errors. Because of these serious problems, the paper failed to actually demonstrate what it has often being cited as doing. As such, those most influenced by Chomsky's paper probably either already substantially agreed with Chomsky or never actually read it.

It has been alleged that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the \"cognitive revolution,\" the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive.

Finally, Chomsky made the concept of \"modularity\" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process.

References:

刘润清，文旭 《新编语言学教程》外语教学与研究出版社

戴伟栋，何兆熊 《新编简明英语语言学》上海外语教育出版社

Noam Chomsky SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE 中国社会科学出版社

南京师范大学 硕士毕业论文 索取号HO一06/B.440