- Thanks are due to the following institutions and individuals, arranged in alphabetical order: Miss S. M. Bow, Principal, Hong Kong School for the Deaf; Mr. K. G. Cooray, Principal, Ceylon School for the Deaf; Mrs. Kamala Krairiksh, Secretary-General, Foundation for the Deaf, Bangkok, Thailand; Mrs. Eva W. Kwan, Audiologist, Education Department, Hong Kong; Mr. Pablo C. Mariano, President, Philippines Association of the Deaf; Mrs. Sin Chow Neo, Principal, and Mr. C. E. Peng, Teacher, Singapore School for the Deaf; Miss J. E. Rowe, Senior Education Officer, Education Department, Hong Kong; Mrs. M. R. S. Segeram, Secretary, Singapore Association for the Deaf; Mr. Joseph Siew, Lecturer, Tungku Abdul Rahman College, Malaysia; Miss Jean Walter, Principal, North Rocks Central School for Deaf Children, N.S.W., Australia; and the Tachikawa School for the Deaf, Tokyo, Japan.
- Noam Chomsky, “Language and Mind,” in Readings about Language, ed. Charlton Laird and Robert M. Gorrell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), pp. 83 and 86.
- Ronald W. Langacker, Language and Its Structure (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 247.
- Wallace L. Chafe, Meaning and the Structure of Language (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 82.
- This is clearly stated in Chomsky (see n. 2 above).
- Langacker, pp. 147–148.
- chafe, p. 82.
- Chomsky, p. 83.
- Ibid.
- John Lyons, Chomsky (Fontana: Wm. Collins, 1970), writes (p. 105): “The only conceivable explanation, says Chomsky, in terms of our present knowledge at least, is that human beings are genetically endowed with a highly specific ‘language faculty’ and that it is this ‘faculty’ which determined such universal features…” But Chomsky also says (p. 84) that “The child cannot know at birth which language he is going to learn. But he must ‘know’ that its grammar must be of a predetermined form that excludes many imaginable languages.” If I take Chomsky seriously here, what he means is that, if an imaginable language were excluded by the child's innate grammar, then it could not be learned. This speculation turns out to be totally false, as will be shown later.
- Chomsky has admitted that the hypothesis of common origin “contributes nothing to explaining how the grammar of a language must be discovered by the child from the data presented to him” (Lyons, p. 112, n. 1). But Lyons explains that this is not the problem for which the hypothesis of common origin is being proposed as an explanation. Chomsky's assumption that certain formal principles of grammar are innate is intended to account for two problems simultaneously: (1) the universality of the principles—on the assumption that they are in fact found to be universal and (2) the child's success in constructing the grammar of his language on the basis of the utterances which he hears around him. It is the second of these questions that Chomsky regards as the more important (”the language is ‘reinvented’ each time it is learned, and the empirical problem to be faced by the theory of learning is how this invention of grammar can take place” (Lyons, p. 112, n. 1)). My point is that if, on the one hand, the universal principles are innate and, on the other, the child can construct the grammar of his language, say, English, then there must exist differences between the principles and the grammar of English. Otherwise, the sound-meaning correlation of English would be identical with that of every other language (e.g., Japanese). How and where does the child acquire the differences between the grammar of English and the universal principles in order to be a “native” speaker of English? How and where does he acquire the ability to distinguish between the grammar of English and that of Japanese in order to know that he speaks English, not Japanese? Are the differences innate (i.e., biologically specified—derived from the genetic endowment, to use Chomsky's terminology) or learned from experiences and linguistic data in the environment? In other words, does Chomsky go so far as to assert that the universal principles include all grammars of the languages of the world, if the differences are innately specified? Note, also, Chomsky's ambiguity, as restated by Lyons (pp. 97–98): “Chomsky's view of man is very different; he believes that we are endowed with a number of specific faculties (to which we give the name ‘mind’) which play a crucial role in our acquisition of knowledge and enable us to act as free agents, undetermined (though not necessarily unaffected) by external stimuli in the environment.” Lyons adds (p. 113): “Chomsky, though he calls himself a ‘mentalist’, does not wish to be committed to the traditional opposition of ‘body’ and ‘mind’. His position would seem to be consistent with the view that the ‘knowledge’ and ‘predispositions’ for language, though ‘innate’, require rather definite environmental conditions during the period of ‘maturation’.” But where do the differences mentioned above come from, the specific faculties or the definite environmental conditions?
- Lyons writes that “Chomsky's conclusion is reinforced, he claims, by a consideration of the process by which children learn their native language. All the evidence available suggests that children are not born with a predisposition to learn any one language rather than any other. We may therefore assume that all children, regardless of race and parentage, are born with the same ability for learning languages; and, in normal circumstances, children will grow up as what we call ‘native speakers’ of that language which they hear spoken in the community in which they are born and spend their early years. But how does the child manage to develop that creative command of his native language which enables him to produce and understand sentences that he has never heard before? According to Lyons (pp. 105–106), Chomsky maintains that it is only by assuming that the child is born with a knowledge of the highly restrictive principles of universal grammar and with the predisposition to make use of them in analyzing the utterances he hears about him that we can make any sense of the process of language-learning.” But, again, I must point out that the highly restrictive principles of universal grammar (what Chomsky has called generative grammar, which is innate) differ considerably from the grammatical principles of English which, in turn, differ in a substantial way from those of another language, say, Chinese. Again I must ask, Where on earth do the differences come from?
- It seems more important to ask this question than the trivial question of how the child is supposed to produce (or create) and understand sentences which he has never heard before. The question is trivial because it is not factual—many children simply do not produce and understand sentences which they have never heard before. The claim has always been a wild guess, without any statistical support; it is sheer fantasy on Chomsky's part. He must remember that a four-year-old has been corrected thousands of times before he is able to talk properly and that people around him (parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, etc.) have spent literally millions of hours talking to him, coaxing him to talk, teasing him, and providing models for him, all before he reaches the age of four. Certainly, these environmental conditions are not simple matters to be casually tucked away as “normal circumstances,” “small amounts of data,” and “external stimuli.” To me, then, it makes absolutely no sense to chat about an innate knowledge of the highly restrictive principles of universal grammar in the process of language learning before any one has seriously attempted to study how these enormous efforts made by the child and the people around him affect the child's innocent brain. It is trivial, also, because the notions of produce and understand are problematic, since a child may be able to manipulate rules to generate a sentence which he has never heard before without knowing what it means. Why? Just consider how many nouns and compound nouns are created every day, each of which may be new to a child; he may be able to put a new noun or compound noun in a sentence properly, but, unless he is told what that noun or compound noun means, I doubt very much that he “understands” the meaning of the sentence which he has just generated or heard, in the true sense of the word understand.
- Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965), p. 51.
- Chomsky, Aspects, p. 58.
- Ibid., p. 59.
- Ibid.
- There are many other statements that pertain to innatism. They are omitted because they do not resemble Chafe's inference.
- Chafe, p. 74.
- Ibid., p. 75.
- Ibid., p. 87.
- Ibid., p. 85 and p. 6.
- Ibid., pp. 76–77.
- Ibid., pp. 73–74.
- Chomsky, “Language and Mind,” p. 83.
- In “Language and Mind,” Chomsky also says (p. 84) that, “consequently, his [the child's] knowledge extends vastly beyond his linguistic experience, and he can reject much of this experience as imperfect, as resulting from the interaction of many factors, only one of which is the ideal grammar that determines a sound-meaning connection for an infinite class of linguistic expressions.” See also nn. 3 and 4 above.
- It should be noted, in addition, that deaf children under school age communicate to a certain extent with their parents and siblings with gestures. Many of those not fortunate enough to attend school (since there is a long waiting list in each school) soon find themselves learning sign language from other deaf people in their community.
- This is true of all schools for the deaf. What has been described as a combined method in the data is simply a way of teaching deaf children several systems of communication together, each one supplementing the others.
- Archibald A. Hill, “What Is Language?”, in Readings about Language, ed. Charlton Laird and Robert M. Gorrell (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 25.
- Here I must add that the American sign language originated in France. According to William C. Stokoe, Jr., (”Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf,” in Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers 8, [1960], pp. 12–13): “In 1815 Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was sent to Europe by a group of public spirited citizens of Hartford, Connecticut, to study the methods of teaching the deaf. Visiting England first, he found little encouragement…; but Sicard welcomed him, indoctrinated him in the method of the Paris school, sent back with him Laurent Clerc who became the first deaf teacher of the deaf in America. The American School for the Deaf was established with Gallaudet as head at Hartford in 1817, and the New York School soon after. At both of these and at many which followed all over the country, the natural sign language as well as the methodical sign system originated by l'Épée was firmly established as the medium of instruction.”
- However, the French sign language, the direct ancestor of the American sign language, is a mixture of two systems which “must have tended to become one from the first” (Stokoe, p. 13), namely, le langage des signes naturelles and signes méthodiques. The former was invented by the French deaf for use among themselves, which probably had been in existence for centuries before l'Épée learned it; the latter was a metalanguage devised by l'Épée, who used both as “the medium of instruction for teaching French language and culture to the deaf-mutes of his country” (Stokoe, p. 10).
- “At any rate,” Stokoe continues (p. 13), “the present language of signs in general use among the American deaf stems from both the natural and methodical sign languages of l'Épée, but even the ‘natural’ elements have become fixed by convention so that they are now as arbitrary as any, and users of the language today are disdainful of ‘home signs’ as they call those signs that arise from precisely the same conditions that generate the ‘natural’ signs but that have local and not national currency.”
- In the United States, however, a distinction must be made between a sign and a manual alphabet (i.e., finger spelling). Although the Japanese sign language was invented by the Japanese deaf with little “contamination” like signes méthodiques, a similar distinction is also made in Japan, except that the Japanese manual alphabet has the five “letters” for a, e, i, o, and u borrowed from the American counterparts. In a sense, then, an American sign and a Japanese sign are not the same and, except for the five “letters,” American finger spelling and Japanese finger spelling are different.
- Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), pp. 14–15.
- I contend that, if the deaf were left alone as they were in the past, they would continue to make use of their sign language without our writing system and would still be able to function properly in their own community. Many deaf children learn a sign language only after they have graduated from school, especially when they have joined other deaf people. If they do not learn it for communication with fellow deaf people, they are shunned and excluded from the group.
- Note that, if a child's hearing is impaired, he will be deaf and dumb, but if his vocal organs are impaired, with good hearing, he will be dumb only, not deaf.
- My argument is based on the assumption that sidedness of the brain became obvious after man had shifted to bipedal locomotion from quadrupedal posture. Dr. Joseph Lee, Professor of Anatomy, State University of New York at Buffalo, told me that even dogs and cats have dominancy in their brains which is not obvious but which may be observed with a simple experiment by letting a cat or a dog play with a ball. One may then observe which forepaw it uses most.
- Kinesics, as has been shown, could have been the main system of communication for all humans. Its importance to human communication in the hearing world has only recently dawned on a number of scholars.
- If we take any current writing system as a point of departure, it is hard to see my point. But if we go back far enough, say to the period of the Cro-Magnons or even that of the Neanderthalers who were experts on paintings and drawings, and if we assume that they were deaf, then we can see that their drawings could have become the basis of a highly sophisticated writing system for the deaf to use today (without recourse to any language).
- This is species uniform and species specific; it is where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and innatism converge.
- If we adopt this change in attitude, we can say that it is man's receptive nervous system that causes the difficulty in rejecting one system of communication in favor of another once the first one has been steadily accepted. For instance, if a language is internalized by a person, it is his nervous system that finds it hard to reject that language and everything symbolized by it in favor of another. This is 180 degrees different from what has been known about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which advocates that it is language that has the power to dictate man's world view in a tyrannical way. In my view, any system of communication—not just language—once internalized, is hard to reject and be set free. This new view also includes systems such as traffic regulations of right lane or left lane driving and such as diet. For instance, if one is accustomed to right-lane driving in the United States, he scarcely dares drive in Japan for the first time, as he thinks the Japanese drive on the wrong side of the road, and vice versa. Another example is that of the American, living in a beef country, so accustomed to steaks and hamburgers that he will not find raw fish edible and will stay away from squid and octopus altogether, all because he does not consider these as food in his “food view.” I think that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is more acceptable to many who have rejected it when it is reinterpreted from this point of view. I dare say that it is in this sense that language has been described by structuralists as a “habit.”
- According to Lyons (pp. 113–114): “One might go on to suggest, as an alternative to Chomsky's hypothesis, that it is not a ‘knowledge’ of the formal principles of language as such that is innate, but a more general ‘faculty’, which, given the right environmental conditions, will interact with these to produce linguistic competence. This could still be called ‘rationalist’ hypothesis in the sense that it contradicts the more extreme form of empiricism.” However, I must insist that such a view also contradicts the extreme form of rationalism advocated by Chomsky and his followers. See also my “On the Fallacy of Language Innatism,” Language Sciences, Oct., 1975.
- Lyons (n. 11 above), p. 99.
- Ibid., p. 111.
- Ibid. See also The Listener, May 30, 1968, p. 688.
- Fred C. C. Peng, rev. of Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar, by Noam Chomsky, American Anthropologist, LXXV (1973), 1918–1921.
- See Norman Geschwind, “Language and the Brain,” Scientific American, April, 1972, pp. 76–83.
- This seems to go counter to the usual belief of transformational grammarians that practically every one encountered is a new sentence. By new, in this sense, can only be meant (1) same words but different arrangements or (2) same arrangements but slightly different words in sentence constructions. If words and their arrangements are always new (i.e., different) in every sentence which we encounter, we cannot communicate. This being the case, many words and their arrangements appear repeatedly, indeed thousands of times (e.g., functors and their grammatical properties). Newness, in the sense listed above, is made possible by content words and their combinations. Cf. n. 13 above.
- Our failure in learning a second language often rests on the interference (of any kind) from our first language. Would it not be just as attractive, if not more so, to explain the difference between first-language and second-language acquisition, if they were separated by a span of several years, in terms of the fact that acquisition of the former starts out with a clean slate, while the slate is not clean for the latter (i.e., it is tinted by the first language)?
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Volume 27, 1971 - Issue 1-3: Child Language--1975