For many people it was and remains a mystery why children learn to speak their native language so quickly. Much less effort is required for them to master foreign speech. A relatively new branch of linguistics called generative linguistics is able to provide answers to these questions.
Psychologists' point of view
Generative linguistics is far from the only science dealing with this problem.
Psychology, for example, explains this phenomenon with the help of such a property of human consciousness as a sensitive period. This is a stage in the development of the child, when his cognitive abilities are at an extremely high level.
At present, the book of the Japanese writer and one of the founders of the Sony electronics company Masaru Ibuka “After three is too late” is widely popular. In this work, the author talks about how important it is to pay attention to the early development of children's intelligence. At the heart of his teaching is the same theory of the sensitive period. Other attempts have been repeatedly made to explain the nature of such a pronounced ability to learn native and foreign languages.in the first 5 years of a person's life.
Behavioral theory
Its supporters tend to consider human behavior and other features of his consciousness with the help of reflexes generated by various external factors. Such scientists, as a rule, do not take into account the processes that occur in the brain in their work, but try to identify the cause of all phenomena, based on information about the surrounding reality.
Defending their scientific method, they argue that mental processes are not well understood enough to be used for research purposes. These scientists claim that their theory is also quite suitable for explaining the mystery of people's ability to quickly acquire speech skills in the first few years of life.
They say that this property of the cognitive activity of children is easily explained by the instinct of self-preservation. In their opinion, the language of communication is also necessary for a person, like food, water and many other things that he naturally needs.
Father of Generative Linguistics
Noam Chomsky, a professor at a technical institute in the US state of Massachusetts, made an attempt to look at this problem from a fundamentally new point of view in the fifties and sixties of the 20th century.
He expressed the opinion that the ability to learn languages was originally laid down by nature, as an innate property of human consciousness. These ideas were expressed by him in the framework of a new theory, which was called generative linguistics.
Basic of the basics
Chomsky's generative linguistics has several variants of its name. Most often, scientists use the term "generative grammar". This name quite accurately conveys the range of interests of this science.
In the most succinct terms, generative linguistics is concerned with discovering grammar rules that are universal for all the world's languages. This linguistic knowledge is stored in the human brain from the very beginning, from the moment people were born.
What is innate knowledge for?
Based on this information, further study of any of the world's languages can take place. What kind of knowledge does generative linguistics consider innate and what knowledge is acquired?
Scientists say that people's minds initially contain basic information about the structure of syntax. This information is universal, and therefore can be applied when mastering any language.
The lexical stock is accumulated by a person during his life, under the influence of various external factors, such as the frequency of communication of an individual with others like him, the class characteristics of the society in which the child is brought up, and so on.
Hereditary language information
As mentioned in previous chapters of this article, generative linguistics studies the basic rules of syntax. Noam Chomsky and his associates, in defense of their theory, cite, among others, the following fact.
In the affirmative sentence, the numeral always comes beforethe noun to which it refers. Examples include the following phrases: twenty sweets, five puppies, seven teapots, and so on. If you swap the words in places, then this phrase will have a slightly different connotation. Twenty sweets, five puppies, seven teapots. In such phrases, a shade conveying the nature of inaccuracies, assumptions is clearly traced.
However, this rule does not always work. It can be applied only if we are talking about numbers not exceeding one thousand units. When there are large numbers in a sentence or phrase, then this scheme can no longer be used. For example, the phrase "I bought two kilograms of dumplings" is built correctly in terms of grammar. But you can't say, "The train traveled twenty-five thousand kilometers."
Scientists involved in generative linguistics claim that this rule, along with many others, is the basis for all the grammars of the world, which means that information about it is embedded in the human mind from birth. This hypothesis has been tested in practice. This is done in the following way. Children who had already learned the words denoting quantity were asked to express an assumption about the number of certain objects not exceeding several hundred. The guys did it with ease. When they had to name the approximate number of stars in the sky, the children began to doubt the correctness of the speech constructions they used. Because all the phrases like this: "There are five thousand stars visible in the night sky" sound illiterate.
The children who participated in the experiment had no idea about this rule.
However, they expressed uncertainty about the correctness of their statement.
Therefore, the assumption of Noam Chomsky, the father of generative linguistics, about the innate knowledge of the basics of syntax, is not unreasonable. The same cannot be said about the rules of word formation. After all, even many adults often make mistakes in the numerals denoting the years of the 21st century. Often you can hear various incorrect variations of this phrase instead of "Two thousand and eighteenth".
It can be concluded that such information is not contained in the set of innate linguistic knowledge.
Innovation of an American scientist
Noam Chomsky argues that the main unit of language for generative linguistics is not a phoneme, morpheme or word, as in other branches of linguistics, but a sentence (in some cases, a phrase).
As evidence, he cites the fact that initially the ideas of whole sentences appear in the human mind, which are then embodied in oral and written speech.
From this it follows that knowledge of the basic rules of syntax is innate.
Therefore, it can be argued that MIT professor Noam Chomsky is a two-time pioneer in the modern science of language. First, he, unlike other researchers, began to consider the sentence as the basic unit of linguistics. And secondly, the scientist tried to explain the human ability to learn languagesinnate properties, equally inherent in all people inhabiting the planet Earth.
A fundamentally new approach
The purpose of generative linguistics is to prove that there is certain knowledge about the languages of communication that is inherited from parents to children. Also, this discipline considers the content of this universal information. For the first time in the history of the science of human communication, scientists asked themselves not about the internal structure of each of the many languages of the world, but about the general principles that unite them. In addition, the researchers set themselves the task of finding the cause of speech. That is, this branch of linguistics is trying to answer the question not about how the language works, but why is it created this way?
Noam Chomsky and his followers are trying to explain the structure of the means of communication by studying the processes that occur in the brain. Moreover, most of the phenomena they study lie in the area of the unconscious, which in many respects brings his scientific work closer to the works of the outstanding psychologist Sigmund Freud.
Along with the work of this researcher, Chomsky also uses in his work the results of the latest data in the field of mathematics, biology and many other sciences. Initially, his idea was to study linguistic issues on the principle of exact disciplines.
Problems and difficulties
In his work, Noam Chomsky had to face a number of difficulties. One of them is the lack of knowledge of the features of the workof the brain, in particular its section, which is called the subcortex and is responsible for unconscious thought processes.
Therefore, new editions of the theory of generative linguistics periodically appeared, which took into account new achievements in different areas of human knowledge, as well as the latest scientific developments of the creator of this branch of the science of language, Noam Chomsky.
Results of work
In the process of development of generative linguistics, the results obtained by scientists can most often be presented not in the form of general rules, but rather in the form of universal prohibitions. According to the opinion that Noam Chomsky himself repeatedly expressed in interviews and his scientific works, the human mind contains mainly information not about how one or another phrase can be said in different languages, but rather about how it cannot be constructed in any way. in one of them.
For example, supporters of the theory considered in this article believe that people are given to know from birth that any sentence includes two main segments. These parts are called subject and predicate, but, unlike traditional grammar, here the remaining members of the sentence are perceived not as independent phenomena, but as components of one of the main groups.
Progressive branch of linguistics
Noam Chomsky is often called a revolutionary in the field of linguistics. His ideas, expressed by him for the first time in the late fifties of the 20th century, literally turned the ideas about the possibilities of studying the main means of human communication. The study of its nature is alwaysremains relevant, since language is one of the most important features that distinguishes a person from all other representatives of the animal world that inhabit planet Earth.
The results of the work carried out by adherents of the theory of Noam Chomsky have also found practical application. The information they received was used, among other things, to develop computer programs for generating speech.
Conclusion
This article has attempted to provide a brief overview of generative linguistics, the aims and results of research in this discipline.
The creator of this branch of linguistics is rightfully called a revolutionary in science, one of the most prominent people of the 20th century.
