Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language

This book offers introductory entries on 80 ideas that have shaped the study of language up to the present day. Entries are written by experts in the fields of linguistics and the philosophy of language to reflect the full range of approaches and modes of thought. Each entry includes a brief description of the idea, an account of its development, and its impact on the field of language study. The book is written in an accessible style with clear descriptions of technical terms, guides to further reading, and extensive cross-referencing between entries. A useful additional feature of this book is that it is cross-referenced throughout with Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language (Edinburgh, 2005), revealing significant connections and continuities in the two related disciplines. Ideas covered range from Sense Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Logic, through Generative Semantics, Cognitivism, and Conversation Analysis, to Political Correctness, Deconstruction, and Corpora.

Key Features

• The only single-volume reference book to focus specifically on ideas from both linguistics and the philosophy of language
• Accessibly written for use at all levels, including undergraduate, postgraduate, academic, and other general readers in the fields of linguistics and the philosophy of language
• Extensively cross-referenced both within itself and with Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language to provide a unique reference resource.

ERRATUM

The publisher and editors of Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language wish to apologise for the errors of fact which they mistakenly introduced into the entries on Innateness and on Truth Values in this volume, errors which were neither originated nor seen by the authors, respectively Stavroula-Thaleia Kousta and Stephen McLeod. The corrected and author-approved entry on Innateness is printed here.

Innateness

The claim that some aspects of linguistic competence are genetically specified rather than learnt through experience. This claim has been driving research in generative linguistics and language acquisition since the late 1950s.

See also: Acceptability/Grammaticality; Continuity; Mentalism; Transformational-Generative Grammar; Universal Grammar

Key Thinkers: Chomsky, Noam; Descartes, René; Plato

Noam Chomsky proposed that humans possess domain- and species-specific knowledge of the structure of possible languages, which enables children to acquire language with the speed, efficiency and uniformity that they do. This view can be traced back to Platonic philosophy and Cartesian cognitivism. Opponents of this view claim that language acquisition is innately constrained but only by the same mechanisms that underlie general cognitive ability. In other words, although it is uncontroversial that linguistic development is innately constrained, exactly what is innate is still a matter of debate.

The argument that has most forcefully been used in support of the position that we are born with innate knowledge of linguistic constraints and principles is the poverty of the stimulus argument (Chomsky 1980: 34):

• 1. Language is a complex system that could only be acquired through experience if negative evidence was available (that is, information about what sequences are grammatically illicit).
• 2. Children only ever have access to positive evidence (information about grammatical sentences).
• 3. Despite this, children successfully acquire language.

If one accepts these premises, one has to conclude that humans are genetically hard-wired for language: children are born equipped with Universal Grammar (Chomsky 1981), containing information about universal linguistic principles which enable children to form specific hypotheses about the structure of the language they are learning. The proposed existence of a critical period for language (i.e. typical language acquisition is not possible after a certain age) and studies of deaf children who spontaneously develop sign language have been used as further evidence in support of linguistic nativism.

Opponents of linguistic nativism claim that the richness of empirical data actually available to children is vastly underestimated; that general cognitive ability can explain how language is learnt from experience; and that the poverty of the stimulus argument holds only given the generative definition of what language is. The most articulated alternative to the nativist perspective has been provided within connectionist psychology (Elman et al. 1996), where artificial neural networks are trained to reproduce complex linguistic behaviour based solely on past experience with relevant data.

Research on innateness has spurred comparative research with animals in an effort to identify exactly what aspect of linguistic knowledge could be species- and domain-specific. Parallel research in genetics also attempts to specify the genetic basis of language. In 2001, Lai and colleagues suggested that a mutation in the FOXP2 gene is causally involved in language disorders. Despite widespread enthusiasm in the popular press about the 'language gene', the exact role of this gene in relation to language development is far from clear.

Although the innateness question is still unresolved, interdisciplinary research that straddles the gap between linguistics, anthropology, artificial intelligence, genetics and neuroscience has opened up novel, exciting ways in which the question can be empirically addressed.

Primary sources

Further Reading

Stavroula-Thaleia Kousta