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Issues in Linguistics: A View From the Outside

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Jayant K. Lele
Jayant K. Lele*
Affiliation:
Queen’s University
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Extract

To an outsider looking at linguistic theory, the problem of internal vs. external evidence seems to arise out of a conflation of two relatively distinct enterprises. The first of these tries to establish a claim that there is a distinct, organic, language faculty (a language organ), that is, a species-specific characteristic common to all humans. The second is an attempt to abstract from the facts of diversity a structure that has equivalent universal characteristics and thus can be seen as an ideal type or as an ideal initial state condition (of a pure and uniform experience) under which a language is acquired by a native speaker. As I understand it, the relationship between these two enterprises is yet to be fully determined given the fact that the physical mechanism that has been deduced to correspond to a property of mind is as of now largely unknown.

Type
Postscript
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 33 , Issue 4: Special Issue: Linguistic Theory and External Evidence , December 1988 , pp. 507 - 511
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1988

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