While Chomsky is undoubtedly a dominating figure in linguistics, he is certainly far from being non-controversial (is that surprising?). Over the years, he has acquired a number of critics and faced many criticisms. According to Jeff Roesler Stebbins in his article "The Evolution of Evolutionary Linguistics" in the June 2007 issue of Colorado Research in Linguistics, one of the things Chomsky has been accused of is "closet creationism." What is the basis for this claim? Is it accurate? These are the questions I will try to answer in a following post. However, in this post I would like provide a background for my discussion of this issue for the benefit of those who are not too familiar with Chomsky's ideas (the image for this post is an example of a Chomskyan analysis of the sentence Happy cats and dogs live on the farm--showing two possible structures based on how the sentence is interpreted).
Chomsky is perhaps most famous (in linguistics) for his view that human beings have an innate facility for syntax (the structure of language), which he calls Universal Grammar (or UG). He has argued that UG has to exist because there is no other way to explain how children are able to develop such extensive language skills at an early age. It cannot be that children learn language simply by imitating the language they hear from others--otherwise, how could it be possible for them to create sentences they have never heard before? Moreover, there is insufficient evidence for them to use to figure out the rules of language on their own. Consequently, human beings must begin with "built-in" knowledge about how language works.
That knowledge consists of two parts, according to Chomsky (the following discussion is based on the version of Chomsky's theory that I learned in graduate school-- I understand there have been some modifications of it since, but the basic concepts, I believe, still hold). One part consists of certain principles which are true of all languages. One such principle is subjacency--which limits the movement of elements within syntactic structures. In Chomsky's view, language consists of syntactic units like noun phrases and sentences, with such units often embedded one within the other. The principle of subjacency prohibits the movement of a word (or phrase) out of more than a certain number of such (embedded) syntactic units. This principle can be seen at work in the case of wh-words used as interrogatives in English (e.g., who, what, where). Consider the question Who do you believe the claim that John hit? (yes, I realize that in standard grammar it should be whom, not who, but this is the more typical form in spoken English). This question is clearly ungrammatical. Why? The Chomskyan explanation would be that the number of embedded syntactic units from which the word who (which is viewed as having been originally placed after the verb hit as the direct object) has been moved exceeds the number permitted by the principle of subjacency. Such a violation is supposedly ruled out by the fundamental principles of UG
The other part of our innate knowledge of language, according to Chomsky, consists of parameters. These parameters allow differences among the structures of various languages, but limit the extent to which languages can differ. One such parameter involves the movement of prepositions and their objects. Some languages do not allow a preposition in a prepositional phrase to be separated from its object when the object is moved to a new position in a sentence, as occurs with interrogative pronouns like who or whom. French is an example of this restriction. In French, one can say Avec qui est-il alle ("With whom did he go?"), but not Qui est-il alle avec? ("Whom did he go with"?). On the other hand, as we can easily confirm, it is quite acceptable to "strand" the preposition in English (With whom did she talk? or Whom did she talk with?). Another parameter involves so-called null subjects--some languages (like Japanese) allow a declarative sentence to have no explicit subject, while others (like English) do not. These are just two of the parameters believed to exist in UG.
Chomsky maintains that all human beings start off with innate knowledge of these principles and parameters. The principles will limit what is possible in any language, while the parameters will allow a limited range of possible options for a language. By listening to what native adult speakers say, child language learners receive imput as to what the setting is for a particular parameter in their language. Thus, for example, a child learning English will hear evidence that the option allowing preposition-stranding is the setting for the parameter governing preposition movement in English, while a child learning French will hear evidence that the option disallowing preposition-stranding is the setting for that parameter in French.
To conclude this post, I hope that the above provides an adequate if basic explanation of Chomsky's notion of UG . In my next post on this subject, using the preceding as background, I will attempt to address the question of whether Chomsky's theory implies some sort of "closet creationism" as some apparently have claimed.