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 discipline‟s 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.

Bloomfield’s school of thought

Structuralism had one of it clearest statements in Leonard Bloomfield‟s 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

language‟s sound system. Each language had an inventory of sounds and a linguist‟s 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 speaker‟s 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-hearer‟s 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 child‟s 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 user‟s

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 foot-

stamping 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 Skinner‟s 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 child‟s 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 mentalist‟s 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 child‟s own language production, the result should be error in the child‟s 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, bettern‟t 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 linguist‟s 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 behaviorist‟s 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 one‟s 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.