THE METATHEORY

1. What is linguistics?
Linguistics is usually defined as “the scientific study of language”. This definition seems to be very simple but before
we can fully understand it, we will have to clarify what we mean by language and what we mean by its scientific
study.

2. How do competence and performance compare?

Chomsky (1965, p.4) makes a distinction between competence and performance. Competence is ‘the speaker-
hearer’s tacit knowledge of his language’, while performance is ‘the actual use of language in concrete situations’.

3. What is Universal Grammar?

There are two definitions of Universal Grammar:

a) From the point of view of the individual, UG is the set of immutable principles which heredity builds into man’s
mind, plus the parameters, which have to be fixed. The principles are very general laws, of a universal nature (e.g.
the Principle of Endocentricity, which states that every phrase must have a head, every phrase is endocentric). They
are invariant across languages. The parameters are binary options. They are fixed according to the type of exposure
the child has. The parameters account for the differences that exist among languages.

b) From the point of view of the linguist, UG is a theory of the initial state of the mind previous to any linguistic
experience. The linguist tries to discover which are the universal principles and which are the parameters.

The two definitions provided above have been included because the term UG is often used in the literature in the
two senses described above so it is important to keep them apart and to be able to decide which sense each author
is thinking of. However, Chomsky now uses two different names for the two senses. He refers to the set of principles
plus the parameters as the Language Faculty and uses UG for the theory built by the linguist about the initial state of
the language faculty.

4. What is Core Grammar?

Core Grammar is Universal Grammar once the parameters have been set. It is always the core grammar of a
particular language (e.g., the core grammar of English, the core grammar of French, etc). A child has developed the
core grammar of a particular language by the age of three. Core Grammar does not include the irregularities and the
exceptions. These have to be learnt. They are part of what is called the marked periphery.

5. What is the faculty of language?

The faculty of language is another name for our first defintion of Universal Grammar.
The faculty of language is our linguistic capacity at birth, a unique genetic endowment. It is present in the mind of
every child and it is going to develop in one way or another depending on external factors: linguistic exposure. If you
talk English to the baby, he is going to develop something very much like English, but always with some differences
from the input. If you talk Spanish to him, he is going to develop something very much like Spanish, but with some
differences. Depending on the input, the faculty of language will unfold along a certain path. This development or
growth of a particular language is technically called parameter setting. Universal grammar is structured in such a way
that given a certain input, it develops along a certain path. Given a different input, it develops along a different path.

The innate language faculty (or UG) is represented in some still unknown way in the brain. It is a species specific
property, a capacity specific to the human species. It is the truly distinctive and most remarkable characteristic of the
species. It is made up of principles and parameters and when the parameters have been set, it develops into a
‘particular’ language. Chomsky calls this cognitive state the initial state or state zero (So).

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Once the parameters have been set, and a lexicon has been acquired (though much of it is also universal), the child
reaches the so-called steady state (Ss). He now knows most of the syntax of his language, while the vocabulary
continues developing throughout his life in a very different (cumulative) way. The development of the syntax is thus
explosive. It is over when the values of the parameters have been selected, at a very early age indeed: four or five
years.

Examples of parameters are:

1) The subject may be obligatory or optional. It is obligatory in English and optional in Spanish.
2) The position of the subject may be before the verb or after the verb.
3) The presence or absence of clitic pronouns, such as le, lo, se in Spanish: Lo vi ayer.
4) The subject of the infinitive may occur in English in certain structures (I want John to come) and in Spanish in
other kinds of structures (Al salir el sol).

6. What is linguistic experience?

The performance of others. A normal child acquires knowledge of a language on relatively little exposure and
without specific training. This experience is extremely fragmentary and impoverished; scattered and restricted
evidence. And yet we are able to learn so much.

Growth of language from the initial state (Si) to the steady state (Ss)
through interaction with linguistic experience (= exposure)

Si -------------------------------------------→ Ss

7. How are languages “learnt”?

Languages are not learnt nor are they acquired. You cannot learn or acquire something that you already have. The
language faculty (or UG) is a cognitive capacity that we inherit from our parents. It is present in every human being at
birth and it grows or develops according to a genetic programme, the same programme that guides the growth of
the body. The best word to describe this process is maturation. Language matures like the rest of the organism. We
may continue talking about ‘language learning’, or ‘acquisition’, but now we are using these words with new senses.
Language development is part of our human endowment. It comes in the genes together with much else.

8. The problem of acquisition: poverty of the stimulus (evidence) - The problem of under-determination of the
theory by the data
Every single human being develops knowledge of a particular language, English, French, Swahili, with the only
exception of pathological cases. This is strong evidence that the innate faculty of language is a rich system, tightly
structured, which, with only a minimum of exposure, will develop into a particular language. It is also strong
evidence that exposure determines which particular language the innate state will develop into. The process is
uniform across the species and virtually without exceptions.

Furthermore, children of 3 or 4 years often say words that they have not heard before (goed, ponió) and our normal
use of language is creative, that is most of the sentences we speak and hear are created anew. They are not
quotations or repetitions of things we have heard before. We do not talk by heart.

How much exposure is necessary for the initial state to become fixed, i.e. for the initial state to become a native
language? Apparently very little, just enough for the child to set the parameters of his innate capacity. That is why
language development is so uniform and so swift. Because languages are not really learnt or acquired from outside.
Linguistic experience is just a trigger which sets the innate mechanism of linguistic growth into action, allowing the
innate faculty to make the choices it must on the parameters it consists of, according to the principles which it is
made up of.

The stimulus, the evidence, the primary linguistic data, is said to be poor in relation to the richly structured initial
state. The theory of grammar is badly under-determined by the data. That is why it has taken so long to hypothesise
its principles.

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9. Similarities and differences among languages
There are several reasons why language differences are so striking and so it is difficult to believe that there is really
only one human language. The following may be valid reasons:
a. In everyday life we are more interested in differences than in similarities. John falls in love with Mary
because she has blue eyes. Scientists however abstract from irrelevant differences in their attempt to
formulate general laws or principles.
b. We have to wrestle with differences when we wish to speak ‘another language’. We even believe that the
essence of language is the word and its meaning. It is not. The essence of language is the syntax, the
computational system which allows me to utter long sentences with sometimes quite complex structures
and my listener follows me seemingly without much effort. But a speaker of another language cannot.
If we regarded similarities among languages with the same interest and concern (as generative grammarians do) with
which we regarded differences, the picture of linguistic variety that would emerge would be quite different from the
one presented by socio-linguists.

10. What is I-language?

Through linguistic experience the faculty of language that every normal child possesses at birth develops into a
particular language, a state of the cognitive system of the innate language faculty, an I-language, where I stands for
internal, individual, and intensional.

I-language can be defined as the cognitive system that is to found in the brain of an adult speaker. I-language is
competence, i.e. the tacit knowledge that the ideal native speaker-hearer has of his/her own native language.

This I-language, a cognitive system, consists of a lexicon and a computational system.

The lexicon is a list of items, each one a set of three kinds of features or properties: phonetic, grammatical and
semantic.

The computational system consists of a number of five operations: selection, merge, move, delete and spell-out. It is
a generative procedure that determines an infinite class of linguistic expressions, each a collection of instructions for
the performance systems. The procedure constructs pairs of sound and meaning, phonetic form and logical form
respectively (P, L), pairs of representations that are interpreted at the two interfaces: A-P (articulatory-perceptual)
and C-I (conceptual-intentional). An interface is a point of contact.

A linguistic expression is at least a pair (P, L) meeting the conditions of full interpretation (FI) and under minimalist
assumptions, at most, such a pair (meaning no other levels).

11. What is E-language?

E-language is performance, an epiphenomenon (i.e. a derived phenomenon).

12. What is grammar?

It is necessary to distinguish two related concepts: the intuitive grammar and the scientific grammar. The latter is the
study of the former. The intuitive grammar is the speaker’s knowledge: his competence, his language. The scientific
grammar is the description of that knowledge made by the linguist.

The intuitive grammar, i.e. language, is not observable. It has to be studied through hypotheses or assumptions that
the linguist sets up which are meant to account for the speaker’s ability. The hypotheses are the scientific grammar.

Whenever an object of study is not observable, we have to examine the results of it: the observable manifestations
of this object, in the case of language, the utterances spoken by people. From them we generalise and set up
sentences, which are then studied in order to construct the grammar for that language.

The rules and principles of a grammar can generate sentences which speakers wouldn’t use, or can’t use, because of
non-linguistic limitations that they have, such as memory limitations. Examples of sentences which are grammatical
in that they are generated by the rules, but which are not manifested are:

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 The horse – the man – my sister … married – bought – died.
The butcher’s daughter’s boyfriend’s brother (regressive structure1)…

13. What is the difference between ‘Language’ and ‘a language’?

‘A language’2 is a particular language such as English, Spanish, Italian, etc. There are linguists, such as Quirk et al.3,
who write particular grammars, which describe particular languages. They are often referred to as descriptive
linguists.

But ‘Language’4, without the indefinite article in English, is a different notion. It has physical existence. It is located in
the mind or brain of every human being. It is species-specific. Animals don’t have it.

Because it is in the brain, we do not have direct access to it. But it can be studied anyway by making hypotheses5
about its nature. These hypotheses are then evaluated, checked against the data (i.e. the different manifestations of
language) and very often changed. The linguists who study language from this perspective are called theoretical
linguists because they try to build up a theory about what language is.

Theoretical linguists try to make explicit the tacit or unconscious knowledge that every native speaker of a language
has (cf. verb buy). Theoretical linguists working within generative grammar try to explain how sentences are
generated or built. One of the requirements for their theory to be good is that it should be universal, ie. that it
should apply to every natural language.

14. What is the difference between a natural language and an artificial language?
A natural language is a human language. How it came to be located in man’s brain is still unknown. A natural
language is given, not created by man, and its study is empirical (i.e. based on what is experienced or seen, based on
reality). It is discoverable, we can guess at it. We can formulate hypotheses about it.

An artificial language is a language created or developed by man. It is not discovered or given. Logical languages, the
language of mathematics and computer languages (eg. logo) are examples of artificial languages.

Ambiguity and vagueness are characteristics of natural languages but they should not be present in artificial
languages.

15. What is a theory?

A theory is a set of hypotheses. In this subject, we will always talk about linguistic theories (syntactic theory,
semantic theory, etc). The linguist builds a theory. He makes hypotheses or assumptions (cf. in Spanish: supuestos)
and then tests them against the data he has and he doesn’t worry if he has to change them. On the contrary, this is
what is expected of him. Through hypotheses he tries to describe reality but he knows that reality is very complex
and that his hypotheses are just approximations to the real thing, thoughts or ideas that he will entertain temporarily
although he knows they may not be correct, in the hope of finding more precise descriptions as he goes along.
(Sperber & Wilson 1995)

Chomsky (1981, p 3): The theory of Universal Grammar must meet two obvious conditions. On the one hand it must
be compatible with the diversity of existing (indeed, possible) grammars. At the same time, UG must be sufficiently
constrained and restrictive in the options it permits so as to account for the fact that each of these grammars
develops in the mind on the basis of quite limited evidence.

A theory of grammar has to be restrictive, constrained. A maximally restrictive theory best fits the facts of language
acquisition: speed, uniformity, little stimulus, no intelligence. The most restrictive theory is best. A theory that allows
anything (everything) explains nothing.

1
El hermano del novio de la hija del carnicero de la esquina (progressive structure)
2
Cf. una lengua.
3
et al.: specialized abbreviation for et alii (= and other people) in this case Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik.
4
Cf. el lenguaje.
5
one hypothesis, two hypotheses (irregular plural)
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16. What are the criteria of adequacy for a theory?
By criteria of adequacy we mean the criteria that make a theory adequate or good. For a theory to be adequate or
good, it should be:
a. Universal: It should account for all human languages.
b. Restrictive: It should only describe human languages, not artificial languages or animal systems of
communication.
c. Minimal: It should be as simple as possible.
d. Explanatory: It should not only describe the relevant properties of language, it should also explain them, say
why things are as they are.
e. Learnable: The theory should account for the speed, uniformity and ease of language development in
children.

REFERENCES:
Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Chomsky, N. (1981) Lectures on Government and Binding. Foris, Dordrecht.
Chomsky, N. (1986) Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. Praeger.
Lightfoot, D. (1982) The Language Lottery: Toward a Biology of Grammars. The MIT Press.
Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. HarperPerennial.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (1995) Relevance Theory. Blackwell.
Radford, A. (1997) Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English. CUP.
Radford, A. (2004) Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the structure of English. CUP.

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