Learning Languages

Excerpt From "Language Language", Chomsky and Language Learning (continued)

Chomsky's critics

Those linguists who do not agree with Chomsky point to several problems, of which we shall mention just four.

1. Chomsky differentiates between competence and performance. Performance is what people actually say, which is often ungrammatical, whereas competence is what they instinctively know about the syntax of their language - and this is more or less equated with the Universal Grammar. Chomsky concentrates upon this aspect of language - he thus ignores the things that people actually say. The problem here is that he relies upon people's intuitions as to what is right or wrong - but it is not at all clear that people will all make the same judgments, or that their judgments actually reflect the way people really do use the language.
   
2. Chomsky distinguishes between the 'core' or central grammar of a language, which is essentially founded on the UG, and peripheral grammar. Thus, in English, the fact that 'We were' is considered correct, and 'We was ' incorrect is a historical accident, rather than an integral part of the core grammar - as late as the 18th Century, recognized writers, such as Dean Swift, could write 'We was ...' without feeling that they had committed a terrible error. Similarly, the outlawing of the double negation in English is peripheral, due to social and historical circumstances rather than anything specific to the language itself. To Chomsky, the real object of linguistic science is the core grammar. But how do we determine what belongs to the core, and what belongs to the periphery? To some observers, all grammar is conventional, and there is no particular reason to make the Chomskian distinction.
   
3. Chomsky also appears to reduce language to its grammar. He seems to regard meaning as secondary - a sentence such as 'Colorless' may be considered as part of the English language, for it is grammatically correct, and therefore worthy of study by Transformational Grammarians. A sentence such as 'My mother, he no like bananas', on the other hand, is of no interest to the Chomskian linguist. Nor would he be particularly interested in most of the utterances heard in the course of a normal lecture.
   
4. Because he disregards meaning, and the social situation in which language is normally produced, he disregards in particular the situation in which the child learns his first language.