Science & Technology: Is This the Last Word in Linguistics? ; for 40 Years Noam Chomsky's Ideas on Language Have Held. Now, Says Steve Connor, There's a New Theory to Get Our Tongues Round

Steve Connor,, The Independent (London, England)

EVERY HEALTHY child is born with the vocal and mental equipment necessary to learn a language. Indeed, language - as opposed to simple sound communication - is one attribute that distinguishes humans from all other animals. And yet scientists find it difficult to understand why we speak so many different languages, with such a panoply of sounds and grammatical constructions.

For 40 years, the study of languages has been dominated by Noam Chomsky's idea of "universal grammar", a basic set of linguistic rules that are determined ultimately by our genes. Steven Pinker developed the idea further in his 1995 book The Language Instinct, in which he argued that language is not …

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Publication information: Article title: Science & Technology: Is This the Last Word in Linguistics? ; for 40 Years Noam Chomsky's Ideas on Language Have Held. Now, Says Steve Connor, There's a New Theory to Get Our Tongues Round. Contributors: Steve Connor, - Author. Newspaper title: The Independent (London, England). Publication date: March 2, 2005. Page number: 9. © 2009 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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