Running head: THEORIES OF LANGUAGE DESCRIPTION

Philosophy of Language: Generativism with Contrast of Behaviorism

Samar Manzoor

Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics Lahore Leads University Lahore

Generativism in contrast of Behaviorism

Background
In development of linguistics as a discipline in the United States comprised in the work of three towering scholars Franz Boas, who was the philosopher of Native American languages; Edward Sapir, the most intellectual among Boas students; and Leonard Bloomfield, who taught languages and trained in the Germanic philology. Boas, Sapir and Bloomfield were the proponents of Linguistic Society of America in 1924, the preeminent professional organization and publisher of the disciplines journal. This approach to language developed in the US and illustrates the point that the development of any discipline is influenced by the cultural and political setting in which it evolves. In the early part of this century, grammars of language produced in the US often differed considerably from those produced in Britain. The anthropological approach with its emphasis on the spoken medium was favored in the US because of the existence of numerous unwritten and dying Amerindian languages.
Bloomfields school of thought

Structuralism had one of it clearest statements in Leonard Bloomfields Language, published in 1933. This model of grammar is still influential and worthy of detailed comment. Structuralist began with the premise that each language was unique and must be described in terms of its own individual patterning. They rejected such meaning based definitions as a sentence is a group of words which express a complete idea asking quite legitimately what an incomplete idea was, and they attempted to look on language study as a science where scientific precision would be required in all formulations.

Structuralist envisaged language as a highly structured, predictable system where one could move from sound to sentence, discovering the significant units at each level and providing rules for combining them. They started with sound and defined a phoneme as the smallest unit of a languages sound system. Each language had an inventory of sounds and a linguists task was to establish which phonemes were significant in the language being described.

Noam Chomsky & Generativism

In the mid-twentieth century, Noam Chomsky, an American linguist first came with the same ideas admitting the supposed requirement of phonetically based discovery what became to known as generative grammar. In 1957 Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, a statement of the principles of transformational generative grammar (TG). This grammar had a profound effect on the study of all languages, including English. TG was a reaction against structuralism and the first model to acknowledge formally the significance of deep structure. Generativism is ordinarily demonstrated as having developed out of, and in reaction to the earlier influenced school of post Bloomfieldian American descriptivism which is particularly an edition of structuralism. It is historically justified to check the beginning of Generativism inside linguistics in this light. But, as Chomsky recognizes later, that there are many aspects in Generativism representing a return to older and more traditional views about language. John Lyons (1992) says that generativism is a part or continuum part of a particular version of structuralism. A grammatical model of a language is an attempt to represent systematically and overtly what the native speaker of that language intuitively knows. A model is thus a system of rules that

relates patterned sounds to predictable meanings and which reflects a speakers ability of to make infinite use of finite means. (Todd, 1987) Generativism is the term used to refer a theory of language which has been developed over the last two decades, by Chomsky and his companions. Generativism not only influenced the branch of linguistics but it became an important discipline in philosophy and psychology of language. Generativism describes its concern with the essential and feasible features of human language by means of generative grammar of one type or other. Generative grammar stresses on the biological grounds for acquisition and use of human language, and the universal principles that constrain the characteristics of all languages (Horrocks, 1987). Language is a set of finite number sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements (Chomsky, 1957). Generativism describes human languages by means of generative grammar.
Transformational Generative Grammar

Transformational generative grammarians set themselves the task of creating an explicit model of what an explicit model of what an ideal speaker of the language intuitively knows. Their model must assign a structure, therefore, to all the sentences of the language concerned and only to these sentences. As a first step towards this, Chomsky distinguished between competence which defines as the ideal speaker-hearers knowledge of his language and performance which is the actual use of language in concrete situations. Chomsky assumes that every sentence has an inner hidden deep structure and an outer manifest surface structure. The grammar of English will generate, for each sentence, a deep structure, and will contain rules showing how this deep structure is related to a surface structure. The rules

expressing the relation of deep and surface structure are called grammatical transformations (Chomsky, 1972)
Language & Innateness

According to Chomsky, language and human cognition develop at the same time. Language is innate; its characteristics are universal among humankind. This phenomenon is same like childs normal development, in spite of a skill learned by some and not by others, such as operating a computer or riding a horse. Children must insure the specific sound meaning combinations and parameter setting used in their surroundings. According to this theory language is set of syntactic rules which are universal for all humans and implicit the grammars of all human languages. This feature of language termed as Universal Grammar by Chomsky. Chomsky introduces a term in his research i.e., I-language & E-language. By I-language he means to say that systems are productive, in the sense that they permit to construct and understand the meaning of indefinitely many utterances that have never occurred before in users experience. Actually from the supposition that human languages have the characteristic of recursion and this reflects to be logical assumption it says that the set of possible utterances in any language is infinite in number (Chomsky, 1957).
Competence & Performance

The competence- performance distinction is at very heart of Generativism. Linguistic competence is the set of rules which speaker has constructed in his mind. The theory of generative grammar can be detected as linguists construct a model for, that part of linguistic competence which is universal and considered to be innate. This aspect of generativism, with its

new interpretation brings the revival of the traditional belief of universal grammar, which has awakened the attention of psychologists and philosophers. A child, according to Chomsky, is constructing an internalized grammar as; he looks for regularities in the speech he hears going on around him, then make guess as to the rules which underlie the patterns. His first guess will be a simple one. His second amended hypothesis will be more complex, his third, more elaborates still. Gradually his mental grammar will become more sophisticated. Eventually his internalized rules will cover all the possible utterances of his language (Fodor, 1966).
Language acquisition device

According to Chomsky, then, a hypothesis-making device, linguistic universals, and (perhaps) an evaluation procedure constitute an innately endowed Language Acquisition Device (LAD). This rich innate schema contrasts strongly with the point of view popularly held earlier in the century that children are born with blank sheets as far as language is concerned. Consequently, some people consider Chomsky to be new-fangled and daring, someone who has set out to shock the world with outrageous and novel proposals. But Chomsky denies this, he points out he is following in the footsteps of eighteenth-century rationalist philosophers, who believe in the existence of innate ideas. Such philosophers held that beyond the peripheral processing mechanisms, there are innate ideas and principles of various kinds that determine the form of the acquired knowledge in what may be a rather restricted and highly organized way (Chomsky, 1965). Descartes, for example, suggested that when a child sees a triangle, the imperfect triangle before his eyes immediately reminds him of a true triangle.

Generativism & Universal Grammar

Recently, Chomsky has spoken of a system of universal grammar with highly restrictive principles that narrowly constrain the category of attainable grammars (Chomsky, 1980), in which he uses the term universal grammar to refer to properties of human, biological endowment. Language universals, Chomsky suggests (1965), are of two basic types, substantive and formal. Substantive universals represent the fundamental building blocks of language, the substance out of which it is made, while formal universals are concerned with the form or shape of a grammar. The substantive universals of human language, a child might know instinctively the possible set of sounds to be found in speech. He would automatically reject sneezes, belches found in speech. He would automatically reject sneezes, belches, hand- clapping and footstamping as possible sounds, but accept B, O, G, L, and so on. He would dismiss PGPGPG as possible sounds, but accept POG, PEG or PAG. But the idea of substantive universals is not particularly new. For a long time linguists have assumed that all languages have nouns, verbs and sentence even though the exact definitions of these terms in dispute. And for a long time linguists have been trying to identify a universal phonetic alphabet which defines the set of possible signals from which signals of a particular language are drawn (Chomsky, 1972). According to Chomsky, children would know in advance how their internalized grammar must be organized. It must have a set of phonological rules for characterizing sound patterns and a set of semantic rules for dealing with meaning, linked by a set of syntactic rules dealing with word

arrangement. Furthermore, children would instinctively realize that in its rules language makes use of structure-dependent operations.

Behaviorism vs. Generativism

For the behaviorists, learning can be the same for every individual because it is socially conditioned. In teaching we can ensure that everybody learns equally well by making sure that the conditions of learning are the same for each. Everybody learn language, not because they are subjected to a similar conditioning process, but because they possess an inborn capacity which permits them to acquire a language as a normal maturational process (Wilkins, 1972). This capacity is by definition universal. In a sense then, the mentalists too argue that language learning is the same for everybody, but the similarity ends there, because for the generativist what the learners share is a capacity the existence of which the behaviorists would deny. For the generativist, language is far too complex a form of behavior to be accounted for in terms of features external to the individual. In a review of Skinners account of verbal behavior, the linguist Noam Chomsky demonstrates that this brand of behaviorism at least is quite incapable of explaining our ability to learn and use our mother tongue (Chomsky, 1959). He attacks with particular vehemence the notion that language responses are under the control of external stimuli that, as he puts it, the individual is merely the locus of behavior and its cause. He suggests that Skinner himself cannot maintain this view and that there is evidence in his book to

contradict it. For him the most important thing of all is that human beings use language whereas other animals do not. It is no use applying principles of learning that have been derived from research with animals, as he says the behaviorists do, to explain a form of behavior that animals are not capable of. Since all normal human beings learn their language successfully they must possess some internal capacity for language that other animals do not have. Since the capacity cannot have been possible existence of unobservable, internal mechanisms that leads these linguists to be considered mentalistic. Such Generativism, however, need not be regarded as an escape from rigorous scientific producers. They would argue that the nature of language is such that it is impossible to explain it without postulating an innate mechanism of a fairly well-defined kind. To the innate mechanism which they propose the name language acquisition device has been given. It is said to operate in the following way. A child, from birth, is exposed to language which acts as a trigger for the learning device. The device has the capacity to formulate hypotheses about the structure of the language to which it is exposed. The child is, of course, quite unconscious of this process. The hypothesis is tried out in the childs own language production and is regularly checked against the further data that his exposure to the language provides. As he finds that his hypothesis cannot account for all the data, he modifies the hypothesis and checks it again. The first hypotheses are very simple indeed. Most children pass through a stage of two-word utterances for example, in which they appear to operate on the hypothesis that there are two classes of words, one limited and the other more or less unrestricted in number, which occur in a

fixed sequence. As the child gets older the hypotheses become more and more complex and, applying them to his own use of language, he brings his speech closer and closer to the adult language. At this point it should be identical with the descriptive grammar that the linguist attempts to write. The arguments in favor of this view are twofold. First, the nature of language structure is such that the child must have some such device. Any other attempts to explain language learning are at best incomplete because they cannot account for the learning of all structural relations. Secondly, there is some evidence from the observation of the language of young children which seems to support the mentalists account of language learning. If their theory is incorrect, many of the rules that the child formulates will be incorrect or incomplete. If these are then applied to the childs own language production, the result should be error in the childs speech. For example, here are forms that have been observed in the speech of children: I breaked (or even broked) my lorry I better go to bed now, betternt I? The significant thing is not that these are mistakes. Anyone can make mistakes in speech. They are mistakes that could not be due to faulty hearing or imitation, since they quite unlike any utterance that the child will have heard from an adult. Something other than imitation of adult speech is going on. The child is operating two overgeneralized rules, the first saying that the past tense of break is formed by regular process of inflection, the second that better is a modal auxiliary verb like can or must and can be repeated in question-tags like those verbs. The making of error is now seen as an inevitable part of the language learning process. It is possible that it is

not only inevitable, but also necessary since it provides the only means that the child has of finding out the limits to domain of the rules that he is formulating.
Role of social factor in Behaviorism & Generativism

What is the role of the social factors to which the behaviorists attach so much importance? For Chomsky they have virtually no role at all. The nature of the language acquisition device and its mode of operation are inviolable. The belief is that with research a clear developmental sequence will emerge, implying that given the nature of the device and the language to which it is exposed, learning will follow a predictable path. They do not, however, necessarily learn at the same rate and it is here that the possible influence of schedules of reinforcement can be admitted. But from the linguists point of view, rate of learning is far less significant than the nature of the leaning mechanism itself. Observation of children learning language also suggests that there are occasions on which pieces of language are learned simply through being heard. A word may be heard, perhaps once, perhaps more than once, but not produced by the child at the time it is heard. There is therefore no active responding and consequently no reinforcement and no repetition. In spite of this the children may suddenly produce the word quite correctly in a totally new context. However useful the behaviorists notions of reinforcement and repetition may be, then, they do not relate to conditions that are essential for learning to take place. There is another way in which the behaviorists and the mentalists may differ, though it is possibly only a difference in the language that they prefer to use. Whereas behaviorists will take of the child using analogy in the construction of sentences, the mentalists prefer to think in terms of the production and application of rules. Chomsky says that the behaviorists break their

own principles in admitting the possibility that a child is endowed with an analogy forming mechanism. If this is so, then perhaps there really is very little significance in the choice of term. For us, though, the choice is important because, as applied in language teaching, they can seem to imply totally different teaching procedures.
Mentalism or Behaviorism ?

One should not leave this discussion without asking whether one can or should make a choice between the two theories. There is certainly some value in developing each point of view consistently and showing the contrast between them. The bases for discussions are more clearly identified in this way and the theoretical significance of any one proposal can be more fully understood. It may help decisions in language teaching not to be merely a succession of improvisations. Even if one decides to adopt methods that imply theoretical contradictions, at least the decision is not being made in ignorance. However, to take the decision to base ones teaching exclusively on one or other of these theories would be quite unjustified in the present state of our knowledge. If we enquire into the empirical basis for either theory, we shall find that they are rather weak. The experimentation that lies behind the behaviorist view is with animals and obviously is not itself concerned with language behavior. The extension to first language learning depends on the assumption that the same principles apply to language learning by rats of how to find their way through a maze. This may not seem a particularly reasonable assumption, but it is possible that some of the principles do operate even if they cannot account for language learning entirely. Language teachers had arrived at not dissimilar ideas on the basis of their practical experience.

As for the generativist theory, it at least is intended to account for human behavior. The empirical evidence for it is very slender indeed. It is not unreasonable to ask whether the capacity for language acquisition remains once the first language has been learned, or whether completely different processes are used in the learning of further languages.

References:-

Aitchison, J., (2011), The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Routledge Classics.

Chomsky, N., (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Chomsky, N., (1981), Lectures on Government and Binding, Forris, Dordecht. Chomsky, N., (1995), The Minimalist Program, MIT Press, Cambridge. Horrocks, G., (1987), Generative Grammar, Longman Group UK Limited, New York. Lyons, J., (1992), Language and Linguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Todd, L., (1987), An Introduction to Linguistics, Longman Group UK Limited, New York.

Wilkins, D (1972), Linguistics in Language Teaching, Edward Arnold.