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Linguistics

One of the greatest distinctives between human beings and animals is language. One scientist who links human intelligence with language is Dr. Noam Chomsky of MIT.

Linguistics is the study of language rules, histories, cultures, and principles. It arose as a science in the 1800s. Before then in the days of Plato, languages were studied mainly for the roots of words, which are called etymologies. Dionysius Thrax in the first century B.C. published the first grammar for the Greek language, which was the language of the educated in that day. Morphology is the form and structure of language. We think of syntax, which is the way that word, clauses, phrases and sentences are put together to make sense.

Throughout the 1800s, linguistics took two forms:

Synchronic - dealing language as it is now
Diachronic - language's historic evolution

Behaviorism became popular as a way of studying human thinking processes in the 1930s. Leonard Bloomfield in the book, LANGUAGE, laid down the structuralism. The structuralists used scientific method and studied language based on measurement rather than meaning.

Zellig Harris, in the 1950s, invented the concept of "transformations." This got beyond the limited structure of the study of language to looking at relationships between different kinds of sentences. Chomsky broke entirely with structuralism by using mathematical symbolism and looked at linguistics philosophically. Since the 1950s structuralism has declined and generative linguistics (Chomsky's methodology) has become the vogue.

Chomsky's greatest clash with the scientific world came with B.F. Skinner, another noted behaviorist. The differences are as follows:

Skinner taught that all humans began with a blank slate in their mind. Like computers, over time, that blank slate is "programmed" much like an animal, say a dog, is taught tricks.
Chomsky with his generative theory taught that there is a universal aspect common to all language. Something genetic in man causes his brain to make language naturally. Not all can be learned by stimulus and response - language in itself is an exception. Chomsky pointed to the fact that young children learned language at a time when in no way could they understand the experience and outside environment as a frame of reference.
Skinner and his behaviorist camp would say that the environment constrains this learning process.
Chomsky says that language shows man's creative ability, which is not entirely dictated by his environment.
Skinner would say that man's will (that part which makes decisions) is controlled mostly by his environment.
Chomsky taught that man is responsible for his decisions.
Behaviorists taught that language is learned by stimulus and response process. Chomsky conceded that habits and networks of associations can be learned by stimulus and response. Conditioning can improve athletic and physical skills: learning tennis, gymnastics, soccer, baseball, etc.
Chomsky taught that language is imprinted, much like a bird knowing to hatch out of an egg. Imprinting is a genetic (generative) process, just like you know that a bird will fly; a cat will meow, not quack; a dog will bark; and humans will talk.

Two experiments supporting Chomsky's thesis

A professor at Wesleyan University, named Richard Ohmann conducted an experiment where he asked 25 people to write one sentence about a cartoon. Putting the words into a computer, he found that 19,800,000,000 grammatically correct sentences could be generated from those very words.

Count the words in just the English language and verify these calculations:

it would take 10,000,000,000,000 years to say all of the grammatically correct sentences in the English language that use exactly 20 words.

Thus, Chomsky believes that language is "innate" for human beings.

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