The Role of Innate Knowledge in First and Second Language Acquisition - by Hasanbey Ellidokuzoglu - Education

V. NATIVISM AND OCCAM'S RAZOR

Chomskyan linguist themselves are willing to follow the principle of Occam's Razor in their theorizing. Such an attitude can easily be seen in their eagerness to reduce the number of linguistic rules to a minimal set of UG principles and parameters (Chomsky's latest theory is called "the Minimalist Program", for instance). But such a minimalist attitude is different from psychologists' reductionism in that the former seeks the Razor within the boundaries of language whereas the latter tries to apply it to whole human cognition. It would, of course, be more economic thus desirable to have minimum amount of principles capable of accounting for every kind of cognitive phenomenon, but as Jackendoff (1993) puts it, accepting language-specific, innate knowledge in the brind of a human neonate is a desparate move:

[W]e're struck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the expressive variety of language demands a complex mental grammar that linguists can't figure out. But on the other hand, children can manage to acquire this grammar. Thus, in a sense the Genetic Hypothesis is a move of desperation. (p.33)

There is some point which should be underlined here: The problem will not be solved some decades later when linguists are able to figure out the grammar in its entirety, as some theorists speculate. When we arrive at a super theory with all its glamour, our desperation will probably be even bigger than it is now. Because reaching at such a theory will be accomplished after decades of systematic and collaborative efforts of cognitively mature professional linguists: after thousands of researches, conferences, discussions, books, etc. But our curious child will continue acquiring the same grammar within a few years. It seems Plato will not lose his popularity even in the third millennium.

As for the reducibility of linguistic phenomenon to general cognitive terms, one should not forget that just like vision or music, language has its own life with a set of domain-specific concepts:

[D]omain-general sensorimotor development alone cannot explain the acquisition of language. Syntax does not simply derive from exploratory problem solving with toys, as some Piagetians claim. Lining up objects does not form the basis for ord order. Trying to fit one toy inside another has nothing to do with embedded clauses. General sensorimotor activity alone cannot account for specifically linguistic constraints; if it could, then it would be difficult to see why chimpanzees, which manifest rich sensorimotor and representational abilities, do not acquire anything remotely resembling human language despite extensive training. (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992, p.11)

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6. Wanna Contraction

7. Universal Grammar

8. Wanna and Turkish Learners of English

9. Conclusion

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