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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
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Thus the child instinctively knows that adjectives could come before or after a noun
Therefore, instinctively knowing that the categories of noun and adjective exist!
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Joined: Mar 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Okay--I was going to do read-only tonight (short on time), but I have to respond to the adjective-noun hypothesis. By instinctive knowledge, is it meant that this knowledge is present, though latent, literally at the time of our birth?I'd have a lot of trouble swallowing that.
If, by "instinct", it is meant that it develops as early language is acquired, yes, I can agree with that; no problem, because of the way we learn language. (Speaking of instinct--I'm writing based on my own, not out of having had any formal education on this subject.) Nouns are the easiest part of a language to learn, so we acquire them first, whether we are infants or students learning a foreign tongue. Teacher points..."chair"..."This is a chair". Mommy holds up a ball, and says, "ball". When the infant has mastered the noun, the descriptors come in, and I think this is a process that is both natural and necessary. We need to communicate, and we can only do that effectively if we can be specific. We can tell an infant, "I'm putting your socks on you", but if we say, "I'm putting your green socks on you", we are helping the babe to learn what we mean when, a couple of years later, we say, "Go put on your green socks".
I guess I could boil down what I'm trying to get across by saying that I think we learn nouns first, so that we know what's around us; "where we are", in other words. And the next thing we need to learn is how to differentiate between things that are called the same thing...say, shirts...for which the outcome of our actions would vary, according to our selection.
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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,027
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,027 |
Nouns are the easiest part of a language to learn, so we acquire them first
In my opinion, this may be true for the second language, but a child first seems to aquire expressions for "good" and "bad/dangerous" (i.e. attractive and aversive), which are more like interjections/qualifiers than nouns. I think feelings are expressed before individual things are identified.
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Joined: Apr 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 3,065 |
The idea is, I think, that the children are born knowing for example that there are words that name things (nouns), words for actions (verbs), and words that describe things objectively or subjectively (adjectives) and with clues about how these words might be fitted together to make sentences giving information, expressing emotion, or giving commands etc., that there are limitations on what grammatical features are possible and the child is born knowing what those limitations are.
Bingley
Bingley
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
Oooh, I missed this one.
Chomsky's main hypothesis (since eschewed) was that there is a "universal semantic" or core of language knowledge which we all share. I don't think I ever read that he claimed that it was genetically hardwired into us, although clearly there is a genetically-conferred ability to speak.
What he stated was that there is an underlying core of meaning which we all understand and that our languages must therefore all be based on similar basic semantic structures because of this. The idea of a basement-level universal language came from this hypothesis. Did well for him, too, academically.
Of course, he was wrong. We may have syntactic and semantic structures for similar situations - the ones which are common to us all - but Chomsky was unable to show that such structures had anything in common across all languages, cultures and races.
Oh, for NicholasW to appear from nowhere and give us his view on this!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,773
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 1,773 |
The feral children cases are certainly interesting, but it is difficult to draw any linguistic conclusions from them for several reasons, the underlying fundamental one being the necessary lack of controlled experimentation. It seems to me that the feral children fall into several categories: (1) children who, once exposed to normal social and physical supports, become remarkably well adapted, including certain skill in language (eg, Kaspar Hauser); (2) children whose skills remain stunted, by either lack of timely exposure to society and language or by inherent disabilities (eg, Kamala the wolf girl); or (3) children whose skills remain profoundly stunted, due to inherent disabilities which might have been the reason they were feral in the first place (eg, Victor of Aveyron, Peter of Hameln). It is difficult to ascertain from the few documented cases whether a particular child's abilities were the result of or the cause of his situation when first discovered by other humans. A child, for example, who suffered from a pervasive developmental disorder would continue to behave in antisocial and nonverbal way, and it is easy to imagine that he was feral because his condition caused him to wander off from his family, fail to seek help when his family was destroyed by disease or other catastrophe, or to be ousted from the family. Of course, in a few cases, we know that the children were seggregated from society for reasons unrelated to thier abilities, and those are the cases in which the children more readily readapted.
Clearly, linguistic abilities depend both on chemical and structural components of our brain and on exposure to language at an early age, but it is difficult to determine the extent to which nature and nurture influence the development of language. Both are necessary, but my own unsubstantiated opinion is that the physical disabilities have a much stronger and more absolute influence than do the social deprivations, assuming all other factors are normal (which, inevitably, they are not).
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