Question

1. What does the linguist Noam Chomsky mean when he claims that humans all possess a “universal grammar”? Provide evidence to back his argument and one criticism against this theory, reference your sources.

Answer 1

Noam Chomsky gave theory of "Universal Grammar".I think he is right in his theory. He says that Universal Grammar is hard wired in our brains. He also says that we are born with an innate knowledge of grammar. It serves as a basis of all language acquisition.

In other words, it can also be said that language is a basic instinct for humans. He also talks about transformation grammar. It is the construction of language by linguistic transformations and phrase construction.

Formal grammar is taken as responsible for person's ability to understand the language along with its easier interpretations. He argues that language is very complex. It has unlimited combination of sounds, words and phrases. All these make it a perplex situation in which, environmental learning alone is not able to account for language acquisition.

As a child grows in his family, he/she observes various faces. Child learns from its surroundings. Surroundings words and listened phrases gets their places rooted in unconscious mind. Child also try to correlate the gestures of persons along with their spoken words.

After the matching of gestures and words, child learns to extract out the meanings of different words and phrases. In this whole process, a language learning is being developed in cognitive mind. This cognitive ability further keeps on constructing the memory space for further learning of language.

Many critics of Chomsky say that humans are not born with innate knowledge of language. Humans learn languages through their experiences and also from their surroundings. They also criticised that knowledge of grammar is hardwired in human brain. They say that first humans make mistakes and then they learn from their mistakes in order to rectify their mistakes.