Summary

We began in §1.2 with a brief look at traditional grammar, noting that this is a taxonomic (i.e. classificatory) system in which the syntax of a language is essentially described in terms of a list of phrase, clause and sentence types found in the language. We noted that Chomsky adopts a very different cognitive approach to the study of language in which a grammar of a language is a model of the internalized grammatical competence (or I-language) of a native speaker of the language. We saw that Chomsky’s ultimate goal is to develop a theory of Universal Grammar/UG which characterizes the defining properties of the grammars of natural languages–a theory which is universal, explanatory and constrained, and which provides descriptively adequate grammars which are minimally complex and hence learnable. In §1.4, we went on to look at the nature of language acquisition, and argued that the most fundamental question for a theory of language acquisition to answer is why it should be that after a period of a year and a half during which there is little evidence of grammatical development visible in the child’s speech output, most of the grammar of the language is acquired by children during the course of the following year. We outlined the innateness hypothesis put forward by Chomsky, under which the course of language acquisition is genetically predetermined by an innate language faculty. In §1.5, we noted Chomsky’s claim that the language faculty incorporates a theory of Universal Grammar/UG which embodies a set of universal grammatical principles that determine the ways in which grammatical operations work; and we saw that the syntax of questions in English provides evidence for postulating that syntactic operations are constrained by a universal Locality Principle. In §1.6, we went on to argue that the grammars of natural languages vary along a number of parameters. We looked at three such parameters – the Wh-Parameter, the Null-Subject Parameter, and the Head-Position Parameter, arguing that each of these parameters is binary in nature by virtue of having two alternative settings. In §1.7, we argued that the syntactic learning task which children face involves parameter-setting – i.e. determining which of two possible settings is the appropriate one for each parameter in the language being acquired. We further argued that if parameters have binary settings (e.g. so that a given kind of structure in a given language is either head-first or head-last), we should expect to find evidence that children correctly set parameters from the very onset of multiword speech: and we presented evidence to suggest that from their very earliest multiword utterances, children acquiring English as their mother tongue correctly set the Head-Position Parameter at the head-first value appropriate for English. We concluded that the acquisition of grammar involves the twin tasks of lexical learning (i.e. acquiring a lexicon/vocabulary) and parameter-setting. In §1.8, we asked what kind of evidence children use in setting parameters, and concluded that they use positive evidence from their experience of the occurrence of specific types of structure (e.g. head-first structures, or null-subject structures, or wh-movement structures).