Читать книгу A Companion to Chomsky - Группа авторов - Страница 17

There is no doubt that Chomsky was a core member of the group that started what is often called “the cognitive revolution” (Miller 2003), which he spearheaded with his critique of B.F. Skinner (Chomsky 1959). His work ensured that linguistic competence was viewed as part of cognition and, together with developments in psychology and philosophy, that mental computations over representations came to be seen as a legitimate and fertile area of research. In this section, we consider his legacy in two areas that we have labeled processing and acquisition.

Chapter 19 by Dave Kush and Brian Dillon explores how Chomsky's work has influenced research on one area of linguistic performance, namely sentence processing or “parsing.” In particular, they carefully demonstrate with examples how grammatical theory is relevant to such research: specifically, how the theory makes predictions about the behavior of the parser.

Work on parsing and linguistic perception focusses on real time processing of language, connecting syntax with psycholinguistics. A more recent development is research into the neurolinguistic underpinnings of language, which is the topic of Emiliano Zaccarella and Patrick C. Trettenbrein's Chapter 25. In particular, they are concerned with the neural signatures of the core components of grammar as put forward in much of Chomsky's work: universal principles of grammar, constituency, recursion, and Merge. The identification of such signatures supports Chomsky's claim that language is a biological system and that his work has significant implications for the study of the neuroscience of language.

Ever since Chomsky (1959), but in particular with Chomsky (1965), language acquisition has been a vital concern when developing theories that can model humans' linguistic abilities. This, in part, arises from Chomsky's conception of language as being essentially a biological phenomenon, where facts about growth and development are often essential to the characterization of its structure: a full theory of the structure of the eye needs to include an account of how it grows. Thus, for Chomsky, a central goal of linguistic theory has been what he calls “explanatory adequacy,” i.e., it must at least account for the possibility of language acquisition. And here a core argument has always been that children are born with the relevant constraints that determine the “hypothesis space” for acquiring the grammatical rules in a given language, what has traditionally been referred to as UG. In Chapter 21, Stephen Crain and Rosalind Thornton provide many examples of children's acquisition of restrictions on co‐reference that demonstrate the necessity of UG for any explanatory account of child language development.

Another area where Chomsky's ideas about innateness have been important is the linguistics of the spontaneous sign languages of the deaf. In Chapter, Diane Lillo‐Martin provides an overview of research on sign language grammar that has been inspired by Chomsky, focusing particularly on what that grammar can tell us about the innateness of linguistic abilities and cognitive modularity more generally.

The last area that this section surveys is work done on atypical acquisition. This encompasses two different types of cases: instances where there is no essential input during the early stages of acquisition, and instances where the stimulus is rich but insufficient due to some disorder. In Chapter 23 by Neil Smith and Ianthi Tsimpli, these cases are discussed in detail from the point of view of the influence of Chomsky's work. Smith and Tsimpli show that they provide invaluable evidence about the language faculty and its distinctness from and interaction with other aspects of human cognition.