A Study Of The Debate Concerning Comtemporary Western Linguistic Innatism

What is the source of knowledge?What is the origin of the language?Is language innate,empirical,genetic,or bodily?Is natural language based on syntactic,semantic oir cultural factors?How can natural language be formalized?The attempt to resolve these problems inevitably triggers controversies,which shed splendid light on the followers' worthwhile researches.Late in the 17th century,John Locke,an empiricist and Leibniz,a rationalist,launched a transitional debate on the source of human knowledge,igniting' everlasting issues in linguistics and cognitive science.Later,pending issues quickly arised even till today in different schools,some of whom attribute language origin to a priori function of mind,later-acquired experience,habit,genetic epstimology,embodiment,and the like.Late in the 1950s,generative granunar founded by Chomsky marked the independence of theoretical linguistics from philosophy.Chomsky argues among human behaviors the uniqueness of language acquisition,different from any other type of experiential learning.He pursues his inquiries into these topics of language and mind,concerning:what the system of knowledge is;what in the mind/brain of the native speaker is like;how this knowledge puts to use in speech;what the physical mechanisms that serve as the material basis for this system of knowledge and for the use of this knowledge are.Chomsky holds that language acquisition to human beings is a unique activity different in kind from any other type of learning which human beings experience.The hypothesis Chomsky argues that the course of language acquisition is determined by an innate language faculty,known as the innateness hypothesis.Innateness hypothesis Chomsky proposed laid its foundation on western rationalistic tradition,criticizing knowledge and linguistic perspectives on its empirical tradition.In terms of tradit.ional empiricism,the paper traced back to these cocepts of Aristotle's spirit and body,Locke's Tabula Rasa,Hume,s habit,and Watson stimulus-response,Skinner's operationalism.For Chomsky's ideas of language formalization,this paper goes back to these concepts of Aristotle,s categories and Frege's conceptual words,Russell's logic of atoms,Wittgenstein's logical images and logical symbols,Carnap's logical syntax,Morris' and Peirce's semiotics,Harris' structuralism and discourse analysis.For Chomsky' s inheritance of rationalist tradition,this paper dates back to these thoughts of Plato's idealism,Descartes's innate ideas,Leibniz's innate principles,Kant's transcendentalism,and Humboldt's inner mental grammar.Chomsky's transformational and generative grammar grew out of the criticism of linguistic structuralism,with its continuous revision more than sixty years.Its theoretical cores are based on the following three basic hypothesis of,namely,the initial state of language faculty,universal grammar and its modularity,and language recursiveness.It is such three basic hypotheses that have aroused,from cont.emporary disciplines of philosophy,linguistics,biology and psychology,continuous criticisms including:1.Chomsky's grammatical properties of brain against of Putnam's scientific realism;2.Clhomsky' s innate grammatical structures against Piaget's genetic epistemology;3.Chomsky's language recursiveness against the non-recursiveness of Pinker etal.Heretofore ever since,the classical issues of language and mind reappeared and in philosophy,linguistics,and psychology,attracting relevant fields to much diverging and pending debates.Is language ability inllately-inhereted or acquired learning?This is the original debate of linguistic innateness hypothesis.Innateness is complexed with its comotation of endowment,a priori,and fron gerie,etc.Language mirrors human mental processes or shapes the flow and character of thought.Interdisciplinary nature of the debate determines the necessity of turning to solutions from its philosophical origin,simultaneously following the linguistic-cognitive front,and of seeking confirmation from the latest achievements in the field of neurobiology and neuropsychology.Based on the complexity of human language,it is evidently believed that only suspecting it innate or acquired seems not to satisfy the adequacy of descriptive and i1nterpretative conditions.With the deepening of cognitive science,there seems exist a consensus t1hat using modern science ERP and fMRI technologies may provide various directions for the best solution of the classical issues.Researches of language ability,on the one hand,there exists a need to explain such as the phenomenon of stimulus poverty,language faculty,initia]state,syntactic recursiveness;On the other hand,it is necessary to study neurobiology concerning sensation,perception,concepts,apperception,central nervous systel)lm,neuron,cortex,anl neural reflex arc etc;eventually into study i ng neuiopsycho logy crorncerning stimulus,response,memory,habit,association,and many others.In terms of neurobiology,from the perspectives of language functions in cortical areas,learning and memory cognitive pathways can help to prove the effections of language mechanisms on gene and experience levels.In neuropsychological aspects,the analysis of spoken and written language input,language consciousness,semantics,syntax,and morphological dictionary of psychology,together with adopting modern non-invasive technology of ERP and fMRI would help to assist decoding language "black box".