Innateness

While Chomsky’s critique of behaviorism was persuasive, not everyone was prepared to join him in what he saw as the next logical leap. Where the behaviorists started from the assumption of the mind as an infinitely malleable ‘blank slate’, Chomsky argued instead for an innate predisposition to learn language. Only this, he claimed, would account for children’s remarkable ability to learn languages at an early stage of development and on the basis of ‘meagre and degenerate data’ (the ‘cootchy coo!’ of stereotypical parentto-baby talk), and to use it creatively. If humans are innately predisposed to learn language, Chomsky argued, then it followed that at an underlying level – which he called deep structure – languages were fundamentally similar in important respects. The innate language blueprint with which the child is born, and which facilitates the task of language learning, he termed universal grammar (UG).

The ultimate goal of linguistics, in that case, was therefore to go beyond descriptive adequacy and achieve explanatory adequacy for grammars of natural language. Where two descriptively adequate grammars account for the same phenomenon, the one that should be selected, he argued, is the one most compatible with universal grammar. A grammar that achieves explanatory adequacy has the advantage of simplicity, because it strips away those rules which are already specified in universal grammar, and which a child does not therefore need to learn.