Jackendoff, R. (1994). Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature. BasicBooks.
Summary
The relation between language and human nature is an open question for linguists and cognitive scientists. In particular, a theory of language ability to should answer the following questions:
- What does human language have to be like to account for the fact that we can all speak and understand a language?
- What are the prerequisites for language? What do we need in order to be able to talk?
In these chatpers, Jackendoff presents the theory, after Chomsky, that the expressive variety of language implies people have a mental grammar, or internal knowledge of the recursive patterns that determine the possible strings for a given language. The basic parameters behind Chomsky’s theory are introduced as two “fundamental arguments.”
Chomsky’s two fundamental arguments
The Argument for Mental Grammar: The expressive variety of language use implies that a user’s brain contains a set of unconscious grammatical principles.
The Argument for Innate Knowledge: The way children learn to talk implies that the human brain contains a genetically determined specialization for language.
To address how people can acquire mental grammar, the theory proposes that mental grammar has a learned part and an innate part. The innate knowledge of language is called Universal Grammar (UG), and may include both general-purpose and linguistic-specific mental faculties.
The argument for innate knowledge leads to two conclusions about what aspects of human nature are required for linguistic capacities: first, that learners must actively construct knowledge from their environment; and second, that some part of language ability is genetically determined.
Atomic notes
Key terms
- Expressive variety of language = “the number of different things we can say by combining words in different ways”; the expressive variety of language implies the existence of mental grammar, or unconscious grammatical principles in the brain.
- Mental grammar = the complete collection of recursive patterns that determine the possible sentences for a given language, stored in individual human memory; “the notion of a mental grammar stored in the brain of a language user is the central theoretical construct of modern linguistics.”
- Paradox of Language Acquisition = children have the ability to “unconsciously and unaided” acquire a complete account of the mental grammar for a language, while trained linguists are unable to replicate the process.
- Innate knowledge = knowledge that is not learned, which is composed of both “special purpose endowment for language” and “general properties of the mind”; innate knowledge is needed to solve the Paradox of Language Acquisition.
- Universal grammar (UG) = innate knowledge about language that humans are equipped with from birth, which is used to find patterns in language in the environment to construct mental grammar in the mind of an individual; this innate knowledge is called universal because it must be capable of constructing a mental grammar for any human language.
- Genetic Hypothesis = “the mechanism for acquiring innate knowledge is genetic transmission, through the medium of brain structure;” the Genetic Hypothesis is a solution to how there can be such a thing as innate knowledge.
- Poverty of the stimulus = the argument that there exist aspects of language that children could not possibly learn from evidence in their environment, so knowledge of these aspects must be innate.
Reading notes
The argument for mental grammar
The notion of a mental grammar stored in the brain of a language user is the central theoretical construct of modern linguistics.
In a way, the unconsciousness of mental grammar is still more radical than Freud’s notion of the unconscious: mental grammar isn’t available to consciousness under any conditions, therapeutic or otherwise.
- What the nature of language implies about human nature: “In order to account for the human ability to speak and understand novel sentences, we must ascribe to the speaker’s mind a mental grammar that specifies possible sentence patterns. But to account for the fact that we have no direct access to this mental grammar, we must admit the possibility that some essential and highly structured parts of our abilities are completely unconscious.”
The argument for innate knowledge
We can draw a [general] conclusion about human nature: We can acquire unconscious patterns unconsciously, with little or no deliberate training.
- Universal Grammar implies three main research questions:
- What is UG—what do children know about language before active language learning?
- How is UG used to construct a mental grammar?
- How is UG acquired—”how can knowledge of cognitive organization be available to the child before learning”?
- UG has a physical mechanism: “Two components of involved [in the mechanism behind innate knowledge]: the determination of brain structure by genetic information, and the determination of mental functioning by brain structure.”
- Determination of brain structure by genetic information: “As Chomsky often puts it, we don’t learn to have arms rather than wings. Why, then, should we suppose that our brains acquire their fundamental structure through learning rather than genetic inheritance?”
- Determination of mental functioning by brain structure: “The [Genetic Hypothesis implies] we can draw freely on biological precedents in trying to explain language. … [Innate knowledge of language] is present only when the supporting brain structures are present. … In other words, gradual development of innate knowledge over several years of life is very much in line with other developmental phenomena.” (Related: Learning and optimization is performed over multiple timescales.)
Nature vs. nurture
- Three basic criteria “to determine how the mental grammar is parceled out between innate and learned parts”:
- Differences between languages must be acquired, so these differences are learned;
- Shared features of languages are likely to be innate;
- (Poverty of the stimulus argument.) Aspects of language that cannot be determined by experience alone must be innate.
- ”What does human nature have to be like in order for us to be able to use language?”
- Language learning is active, not passive: “Language learners actively construct unconscious principles that permit them to make sense of the information coming from the environment. These principles make it possible not just to reproduce the input parrotlike, but to use language in novel ways.”
- “There are strong implications for one’s approach to education: one should see the learner as an active agent of learning, not just a vessel to be filled with facts.” (Related: Life experience is incompressible.)
- Some knowledge about language is genetically determined: “The fact that language learning is supported by a genetic component is what makes the task possible for every normal child, despite the complexity of the resulting knowledge.”
- Language learning is active, not passive: “Language learners actively construct unconscious principles that permit them to make sense of the information coming from the environment. These principles make it possible not just to reproduce the input parrotlike, but to use language in novel ways.”