Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T14:15:50.462Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction: grammatical categories and the biolinguistic perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2011

M. Rita Manzini
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy
Leonardo M. Savoia
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy
Get access

Summary

According to Chomsky (2000b: 119), ‘the human language faculty and the (I–)languages that are manifestations of it qualify as natural objects’. This approach – which ‘regards the language faculty as an “organ of the body”’ – has been labelled the ‘biolinguistic perspective’ by Chomsky (2005: 1). Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002: 1570) base their discussion of the key biological question of evolution on the ‘biologically and individually grounded’ use of the term language ‘to refer to an internal component of the mind/brain (sometimes called “internal language” or “I-language”)’. They distinguish two conceptions of the faculty of language, one broader (FLB) and one narrower (FLN):

FLB includes FLN combined with at least two other organism-internal systems, which we call ‘sensory-motor’ and ‘conceptual-intentional’ … A key component of FLN is a computational system (narrow syntax) that generates internal representations and maps them into the sensory-motor interface by the phonological system and into the conceptual-intentional interface by the (formal) semantics system … Most, if not all, of FLB is based on mechanisms shared with nonhuman animals … FLN – the computational mechanism of recursion – is recently evolved and unique to our species.

(Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch 2002: 1571)

The conception of the language faculty and of (I-)languages as ‘natural’, ‘biologically grounded’ objects corresponds to specific theories concerning their internal articulation:

the I-language consists of a computational procedure and a lexicon. The lexicon is a collection of items, each a complex of properties (called ‘features’) … The computational procedure maps an array of lexical choices into a pair of symbolic objects, phonetic form and LF [logical form] … The elements of these symbolic objects can be called ‘phonetic’ and ‘semantic’ features, respectively, but we should bear in mind that all of this is pure syntax and completely internalist.

(Chomsky 2000b: 120)
Type
Chapter
Information
Grammatical Categories
Variation in Romance Languages
, pp. 1 - 12
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×