![]() ![]() Chomsky's colleague Steven Pinker, the director of M.I.T.'s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, has brought Mr. ![]() Now, in a brilliant, witty and altogether satisfying book, Mr. ![]() In terms of Chomskyan theoretical linguistics, in discourse so opaque that it was nearly incomprehensible even to some scholars, many people did not hear it. The grammaticalįaculty was built into the infant brain, and your average 3-year-old was not a mere apprentice in the great enterprise of absorbing English from his or her parents, but a "linguistic genius." Since this message was couched Starting in 1957, he proclaimed a new doctrine: Language, that most human of all attributes, was innate. Then along came Noam Chomsky, the iconoclastic linguist and short-fused political gadfly at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We were told that by means of language and culture, humans had left behind the biological imperatives that enchained the rest of the animal world: culture was "superorganic." WHEN I was a graduate student in anthropology in the 1950's, the word from on high was that the human infant was an unformed lump of clay that eventually, through the process of education by its elders and betters, would receive its language, itsĬulture and even its sexual identity. February 27, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |