Introduction
from: Term Paper
on Integrated Theory of Second Language Acquisition
Noam Chomsky revolutionized and invigorated
linguistics in the late 1950s and early 1960s by making the quarrel that the
basis of language is hereditarily given and domain-specific. The development of
normal generative grammar since then can be seen as an effort to work out the
details of this claim. However, the basic argument remains the same: no matter
which language a child is out to, he or she will obtain the grammar of that
language, but-importantly-the input to which the child is exposed severely
underdetermines the knowledge the child ends up with. UG supplies that part of
knowledge of language that is not in fact in the input itself. Indeed, one of
the central tenets of generative grammar since its inception has been that UG
places severe restrictions on the class of grammars that human beings can
obtain. It is this assertion that accounts, in principle, for the rapidity and
apparent effortlessness with which children normally obtain their native
language: since in acquiring the grammar of their L1, children are selecting
from only a small subset of the logically potential formal systems-the
relatively small set given by UG-exposure to random, contextualized sounds
suffices as their only direct, external proof.
That the task of acquiring language is underdetermined does not just mean that
the speech stream contains no word or morpheme boundaries-much less category
labels, hierarchical structure, signals for dependency relations, flags for
mapping from syntax to semantics, etc. In short, the entire rationale for the
existence of UG rests on the information that linguistic systems are vastly
underdetermined by the data of experience. This is, again, the quarrel for UG
from the poverty of the stimulus.
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The Noam integrated theory of second language acquisition can be see as
dissimilar kinds of poverty of the incentive problems in L1 acquisition. The
most convincing are those that give a paradigm of two separate patterns that
look quite strange if all that were concerned was some sort of analogical
process between one pattern and the other. In other words, if analogy were the
key, then the two patterns would be predictable to be more alike, and this is
exactly not, what in actuality occurs? As a descriptive example, let us think
types of ellipsis, specially, ellipsis inside the domain of the verb.
Cross-linguistically, there are different abbreviation processes that target a
verb and its argument. (Chomsky. N. (1959) According to the followers of
the American linguist, Noam Chomsky, this can stand as a symbol for what the
process of obtaining a language consists in at least for a mother tongue. The
child does not learn the language, but creates it anew. (Longman, 1962)
Does this have anything to tell us about learning a foreign language? It has
often been noted that, whereas just about everyone learns a first language with
great ease, very few people manage to learn a second language so well that they
can pass for a native. Furthermore, while there is very little dissimilarity in
final capability in L1, people varies widely in the extent to which they obtain
an L2. One of the first questions that we should ask, then, is whether there is
any relationship between the gaining of an L1 and the acquisition of an L2. In
order to answer this question, we first need to look more intimately at what is
known about L1 acquisition.
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Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best known and the
most important linguist of the second half of the Twentieth Century. He has made
a number of strong claims about language: in meticulous, he suggests that
language is an inborn faculty that is to say 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 foundation upon which all human languages build. If
a Martian linguist were to visit Earth, he would deduce from the proof that
there was only one language, with a number of local alternatives. Chomsky gives
a number of reasons why this should be so. Among the most important of these
reasons is the ease with which children acquire their mother tongue. He claims
that it would be little short of a miracle if children learnt their language in
the same way that they learn mathematics or how to ride a bicycle. Children are
exposed to very little properly formed language. When people speak, they
constantly break off themselves, change their minds, and make slips of the
tongue and so on. Yet children manage to learn their language all the same. (Noam
Chomsky: 1995.)
