CHOMSKY & CO.
Annalisa Baicchi (baicchi@ats.it)
Sat, 18 Apr 1998 15:14:31 +0200
Hey Brendan, Scottie, Win and friends,
unfortunately I've not read Pinsky yet: I'll do it soon, thanks for your
suggestion.
I feel it is my responsability to have shifted our salingerian discussion
to Chomsky by quoting Wittgenstein , despite the quotation was meant to
discuss syntax problems not lexical (the Greek and their problem with
browness).
As far as I can remember, and simplifying the concept so much that I
should be ashamed, Chomsky suggests that our brain contains something he
called LAD, language acquisition device, by means of which the newborn
child, if exposed to linguistic data, performs language. It is thanks to
this part of our brain, the left-parietal lobe, that we can actually
perform language. LAD contains the Universal Grammar, a set of universal
rules containing the grammatical features shared by all languages, a
device which works according to the binary principle: being exposed to a
linguistic environment LAD recognizes the main features of the language it
is exposed to and, in more or less 18 - 20 months, it enables the child to
speak the language he is exposed to, even if at the beginning making
grammatical mistakes.
This chomskian idea was then ameliorated by Lenneberg and by Piaget.
...SORRY...let me stop getting you bored with this letter which obviously
is not meant to teach anyone anything , beacuse I've everything to learn
from you and I'm not in the position to teach...!!!
I don't think that language precedes and determines thought completely nor
the contrary ( even if, maybe, a little bit of truth there is in the
Whorfian theory), but what I wanna ask is: is there any connection
between the linguistic competence and our speculative abilities? Is it
still true, as they said decades and decades ago, that the more difficult a
language is, the more intelligent the people speaking that language?
Help me find an answer !
Annalisa