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But is the information obrained from the outside world… | blogjou

Murray Gell-Mann

The Quark and the Jaguar

53
31 Aug 2021

But is the information obrained from the outside world...


But is the information obtained from the outside world, for example from a parent who speaks the language in question, sufficient to construct such an internal grammar? That question has been answered in the negative by Noam Chomsky and his followers, who conlcude that the child must come already equipped at birth with a great deal of information applicable to the grammar of any natural human language. The only plausible source of such information is a biologically evolved innate proclivity to speak languages with certain grammatical features, shared by all natural human languages. The grammar of each individual languange also contains additional features, not biologically programmed. Many of those vary from language to language, although some are probably iniversal like the innate ones. The additional features are what the child has to learn.