Language Acquisition vs Language Learning
Within the idealizations of linguistic theory, language acquisition is viewed as an “instantaneous” process ( 1965). In normal development children progress through stages, they make errors (errors from the viewpoint of the adult language), and there are delays. The challenge for any developmental theory is to explain these stages, errors, and delays. It must specify those factors learning, maturational, grammatical, and so forth that extend the acquisition process beyond the idealized instant.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the theory of Noam Chomsky on Language Acquisition and contrast it with language learning. ( 1981)
The paper will also explain the actual, real time acquisition, models that predict discrete stages in the course of language development and the P and P theory of Chomsky.
Chomsky explained the concept of the child’s internalized language, the child’s externalized language and of course grammar. The central concern of linguistic theory is to explain how human beings come to acquire a system of linguistic knowledge the complexity, specificity, and richness of which is vastly underdetermined by the available data. This is the so-called logical problem of language acquisition or what Chomsky sometimes referred to as “Plato’s Problem” ( 1986). Linguistic theory answers that we are innately endowed with a set of linguistic principles, Universal Grammar (UG), which interact with the input from a particular linguistic context to determine in each of us a particular adult grammar.
Within current conceptions, UG is a parametrized system ( 1981, and references cited there). The parameters of UG express the limited range of variation that exists across languages. Languages are either head first (VO) or head last (OV) (English vs. Japanese); pro-drop or non -pro-drop (Italian vs. German); verbs undergo syntactic movement or they do not (French vs. English); question words undergo syntactic movement or they do not (English vs. Chinese); anaphors are locally bound or they are not (English vs. Icelandic); and so on. The parameters of UG must be “fixed” by the child through experience. The P&P framework makes the implicit assumption, with respect to learning, that the fixing of parameters (and language development, more generally) is an “errordriven” process ( 1980). Children progress from one
The developmental stage (read grammar) to the next when they encounter input data that are not analyzable by the current grammar. This input is said to “trigger” a change from one state of linguistic knowledge to another state of linguistic knowledge. Given a finite number of parameters, each with a finite number of values (ideally, each parameter is binary), the transition is straightforward. If the child’s parameter P is set at value x, then recalcitrant data will trigger a resetting to value y. Error-driven acquisition usually presupposes that in the child’s grammar P is set to some “initial” or “default” (also referred to as the “unmarked” value; (1980). This value may or may not be the correct value for a particular adult “target” language. Where it is incorrect, the input data will force a resetting to the correct value. A further assumption is that the child does not have access to negative evidence -information about the ill-formedness of certain strings and thus parameters must be fixed on the basis of positive evidence.
Language development thus involves, among other things, fixing the parameters of UG at the values that are correct for a particular linguistic community. The system that results from the fixing of parameters is a “core grammar” ( 1981), a central component of linguistic knowledge. Like the familiar “instantaneous acquisition,” core grammar is an idealization insofar as what is actually represented in the mind of an individual goes beyond core grammar in various ways. The actual internalized knowledge is a core grammar plus a “periphery” of language specific rules and constructions, lexical and marked properties, pragmatic rules, and much else.
Central to the P&P model is the modularity hypothesis, that is, the thesis that human language is an epiphenomenon that arises through the interaction of rules and principles in a number of distinct modules. There is modularity within the syntax proper. For example, “passives” are formed by the interaction of principles of case assignment, theta-role assignment, and Move alpha (1981) and not through a single transformational operation as in the standard theory; (1965). And there is modularity within the larger “language faculty,” which contains (minimally) a syntax, a semantics, morphological and phonological components, a pragmatics, as well as a lexicon and language processor, and various other cognitive faculties that affect language. Thus, the P&P theory marked a radical shift away from a system of language-specific and construction-specific rules prevalent in earlier theories to general principles with parameters of variation.
Any linguistic theory imposes a particular conception of development and thus the theory must reckon with the facts of actual development insofar as these are apparent. Some have argued that the P&P model predicts discrete stages in language development and have criticized the model on these grounds because the “stages” of language acquisition appear to be nondiscrete. Similarly, (1981) argued that parameter models preclude “gradual” or “partial” acquisition and thus fail to explain those cases where the child shows less than perfect mastery of some aspect of language. Others have argued that the P&P model predicts a universal course of development and thus fails to account for the cross-linguistic and individual variation we find during development ( 1970).
In addressing the question of whether the P&P model predicts discrete stages in language development it is useful to distinguish two senses of the word “language,” which ( 1986) referred to as I-language and E-language. I(nternalized)-language is the system of knowledge represented in the mind of an individual. The I-language of the child is whatever system of knowledge is represented in the child’s mind at some particular maturational point. E(xternalized)-language, on the other hand, refers to a set of actual or potential utterances.
With respect to the child, E-language would be the set of utterances associated with a particular period of development. Most discussions of discreteness in language acquisition center around the apparent gradualness of transitions in the child’s E-language, that is, changes in the set of utterances associated with different “stages” (1970). Thus, null subject sentences do not disappear from the child’s corpora in one fell swoop, just as the full range of passive verbs do not appear at once. It is important to bear in mind, however, that the P&P theory is a theory of I-language and discreteness is a property associated with rules and principles. Thus, to the extent that the theory predicts discrete changes in development, it predicts them with respect to the child’s I-language and such changes need not be perfectly reflected in the child’s E-language. Viewed from a slightly different perspective, discreteness (like instantaneous acquisition) exists under idealized circumstances, circumstances in which the different modules of I-language develop at precisely the same rate and in complete isolation from one another. Such discreteness is not likely to show up in actual development, which involves interactions between the parameters of core grammar and rules, principles, lexical properties, and so forth outside the core, and in which the rate and manner of development in different components varies. We expect the child’s E-language to reflect the interaction of these modules.
Structural and descriptive linguistics, behavioral psychology, and other contemporary approaches tended to view a language as a collective action, or utterances, or linguistic forms (words, sentences) paired with meanings, or as a system of linguistic forms or events. In Saussurean structuralism, a language () was taken to be a system of sounds and an associated system of concepts; the notion of sentence was left in a type of midpoint, to be accommodated within the study of language use (1986). For , as noted earlier, a language is “the totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community.” The American variety of structural-descriptive linguistics that was heavily influenced by Bloomfield’s ideas furthermore concentrated primarily on sound and word structure, apart from various proposals, notably those of Zellig Harris, as to how larger units (phrases) could be constructed by analytic principles modelled on those introduced for phonology and morphology. 5 Many researchers today adopt a position of the sort lucidly developed by , who defines a language as a pairing of sentences and meanings (the latter taken to be set-theoretic constructions in terms of possible worlds) over an infinite range, where the language is “used by a population” when certain regularities “in action or belief” hold among the population with reference to the language, sustained by an interest in communication Let us refer to such technical concepts as instances of “externalized language” (E-language) (1965), in the sense that the construct is understood independently of the properties of the mind/brain. Under the same rubric we may include the notion of language as a collection (or system) of actions or behaviors of some sort. From a point of view such as this, a grammar is a collection of descriptive statements concerning the E-language, the actual or potential speech events (perhaps along with some account of their context of use or semantic content).
In technical terms, the grammar may be regarded as a function that enumerates the elements of the E-language. Sometimes, grammar has been regarded as a property of E-language, as in Bloomfield’s remark that a grammar is “the meaningful arrangement of forms in a language” ( 1981). Despite appearances, the problem of accounting for the unbounded character of the E-language and the person’s knowledge of language including this fundamental property is not squarely addressed in such approaches, a matter to which we will return.
The E-language is now understood to be the real object of study. Grammar is a derivative notion; the experts are free to choose the grammar one way or another as long as it correctly identifies the E-language. Apart from this consideration, questions of truth and falsity do not arise. for example, has argued that it is senseless to take one grammar rather than another to be “correct” if they are extensionally equivalent, characterizing the same E-language, for him a set of expressions ( 1972). And Lewis doubts that there is any way “to make objective sense of the assertion that a grammar G is used by a population P whereas another grammar G′, which generates the same language as G, is not.”
The notion of E-language is familiar from the study of formal systems, as is the conclusion just cited: In the case of the “language of arithmetic,” for example, there is no objective sense to the idea that one set of rules that generates the well formed formulas is correct and another wrong.
As for UG, to the extent that such a study was recognized as legitimate, this theory would consist of statements that are true of many or all human languages, perhaps a set of conditions satisfied by the E-languages that count as human languages (1986). The notion that “language is a individual action that differs without assignable limit.” Such statements reflect a fairly broad consensus of the time. Even though they could hardly have been intended literally, they did express a relativistic impulse that denigrated the study of UG. More precisely, it cannot be that human language varies without assignable limit, though it might be factual that it is “infinitely diverse”; it is an empirical question of some interest whether UG permits an infinite variety of possible languages (or a variety that is infinite in more than structurally trivial respects, say, with no bound on vocabulary), or only a finite diversity.
Nevertheless, significant contributions were made to UG in our sense within these traditions (1965). For example, the theory of distinctive features in phonology, which greatly influenced structuralist studies in other fields, postulated a fixed inventory of “atomic elements” from which phonological systems could be drawn, with certain general laws and implicational relations governing the choice. And it was generally assumed that such notions as topic and comment, or subject and predicate, were universal features of language, reflecting the fact that a declarative sentence is about something and says something about it. Later, important work on linguistic universals was conducted by Joseph Greenberg and others, yielding many generalizations that require explanation, for example, the fact that if a language has subject-object-verb order, it will tend to have postpositions rather than prepositions
There is a significant peculiarity made by linguists between language acquisition and language learning. Children obtain language in the course of a subconscious process throughout which they are unconscious of grammatical rules. This is comparable to the way they acquire their first language (1981). They get to distinguish what is right and what is wrong. The young child requires having a natural foundation of communication. The most important is the content of communication and the least important is the structure. Young children that are more exposed to using English have more “on the job” exercise. They can acquire the language faster than with their classmates.
On the other hand, the process of language learning is not communicative. It is the impact of the direct teaching in the imperatives of language. And it positively is not an age-proper activity for learners. In language learning, learners are aware of the facts that new language and can converse about that knowledge (1981). They can write the answers on the blank grammar page. Studies have proved, that having knowledge on grammar rules does not mean to yield good communication skills and writing. A learner may have mastered the rules of language and may be able to perfect the standardized examination of English language, however, he may not be able to speak or write appropriately.
Chomsky’s language acquisition discusses the process of natural absorption. That involves the use of intuition and subconscious learning, which is the result of real conversation between people where the learner is a direct participant. It is the same to the process in which the children acquire their first language without any theoretical information (1986). It develops knowledge with phonetic features of the language as well as its form and vocabulary, and is accountable for oral perception. The ability for creative form of communication and for the identification of cultural is also being considered by language acquisition. The activities in teaching and learning language are considered to be a psychological plane. Chomsky’s theory of acquisition commends the communicative act and enhances the learner’s self-confidence.
One great illustration of language acquisition engages learners who live overseas for a year in an exchange program, gaining near native fluency, while they are aware a little about the language in most cases (1986). They have excellent pronunciation even without the concept of phonology, present tense is, modal or phrasal verbs are, and however, they spontaneously identify and know how to utilize all the forms.
On the contrary, the notion of language learning is connected to the conventional approach to the study of languages and currently is still generally exercised in schools globally. The central concern of language learning is in its written structure and the aim is for the learner is to fully comprehend the form and rules of the language by applying the intellect and logical deductive reasoning. Structure is more essential than communication (1981). Teaching and learning are technical and are made of formal instructional plan with prearranged syllabus. In this case, the teacher is empowered and the learner is mainly passive. For an instance in teaching English in China, the learner will study the use of the interrogative and negative modes, irregular verbs and modals. The learner masters to create sentences in the perfect tense, however, it is very hard for the learner to use it because it involves progressive and cumulative process and usually attached to a predetermined program that comprises memorization of vocabulary. It seeks to send out to the learner some knowledge about the language, its function and grammatical organization with its irregularities, its differences with the learner’s native language, knowledge that expectantly will create the sensible skills of sympathetic and speaking the language (1972). This effort of collecting knowledge becomes annoying because of the lack of familiarity with the language. Numerous graduates with arts degrees in English are classic examples of language learning or language acquisition. They often are skilled and theoretically intelligent to teach a language that they can communicate in only with extreme difficulty.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment