1.1.1. Setting the bridge
The generative model developed by Chomsky is a breakdown vis
à vis the structuralist approach used by some famous linguists such as
Leonard Bloomfield, André Martinet and Zellig Harris. In this model,
Chomsky continues to stress on descriptive adequacy but also adds explanatory
adequacy to emphasize the interest in how the language faculty is represented
in humans. The focus is on what a native speaker knows about its language
(competence) and ceases to know about the linguistic production of this one
(performance). The main task of the generative enterprise is to elucidate the
computational system within the mind/brain of the language user.
The generative approach has also revolutionized the field of
language learning highly dominated by behaviorism in 1950. In fact, the input
to language learning is poor and the evidence of this poverty of the stimulus
is that speakers know so much more than what they
1 Chomsky (2000: 92) claims that MP
is a program, not a theory that seeks to discover to what extent minimal
conditions of adequacy suffice to determine the nature of the right theory.
have evidence for from the input. The answer to this problem
of the impoverished input is Universal Grammar, the initial state of the
language faculty. This biologically innate organ helps the learner to make
sense of linguistic data and build an internal grammar (I-language), which then
produces the sentences that the speaker utters (E-language). According to
Chomsky (1975: 36), when the language faculty is stimulated by appropriate and
continuing experience, it creates a grammar that generates sentences with
formal and semantic properties. Thus, as it is outlined by Elly Van Gelderen
(2013), our innate language faculty (or Universal Grammar) enables us to create
a set of rules, or grammar, by being exposed to (rather chaotic) language
around us. The set of rules that we acquire enables us to produce sentences
that we have never heard before. These sentences can also be infinitely long.
As it is shown on the figure below, language acquisition, in this framework, is
not imitation but an interaction between Universal Grammar and exposure to a
particular language
The language
faculty
(Universal
Grammar)
Input (English,
Gh?maìlaì', French, etc)
I-language
E-language
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Figure 2: The model of language acquisition in
Generative Grammar Source: Adapted from Van Gelderen (2013)
The main task of generative grammar since its inception is to
design a theory of Universal Grammar which satisfies the following criteria:
universality, descriptive adequacy, explanatory adequacy and learnability. The
universality criterion requires that a theory of UG should feed us tools to
develop a grammar for every and any human language. A grammar is descriptively
adequate if it can correctly distinguish grammatical constructions from
ungrammatical ones by describing and interpreting those constructions may have.
An explanatorily adequate grammar is the one which can provide answers to the
following preoccupation `why do natural language grammars have the properties
they do?' A linguistic theory must produce a grammar which is learnable by
young children in a relatively short period of time. This quest of the
«best» theory, especially the one where there is a balance between
the descriptive and the explanatory adequacy, pushes Chomsky to review what he
proposed so far in syntactic structures.
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