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I should like to take the opportunity to ask anew some puzzling questions about what it is, beyond a splendid nervous system, that makes it possible for the young child to acquire language so swiftly and so effortlessly. Perhaps they are no longer puzzling questions save to those of us who have spent a great deal of time working and brooding over whether the acquisition of knowledge about the social world and about the world generally is in some sense constitutive of language.
I have now spent a decade on this topic, have indeed just completed a general book on it (with which I am not at all happy) and a specific monograph on the growth of request forms (with which, curiously, I am really quite pleased). This puzzles me. For the conclusion of the general book is that language as such (by which I mean the lexico-grammatical code employed in linguistic communication) does not derive from other forms of knowledge in any save the most grandly historical sense. But the conclusion of the monograph is that the child is hugely aided in his mastery of linguistically mediated requests by the social interactions into which he enters with his mother and other adults. The rest of what I have to say is concerned with clarifying this seemingly contradictory juxtaposition.
Let me consider first the various senses in which one can interpret the meaning of a statement to the effect that a knowledge of the world, social and physical alike, does or does not lead "naturally" to a knowledge of lexico-grammatical language. 1 would be well advised to begin the discussion with two views of the matter that are so well known as to be tempting to those who are either innocent or who have become so fatigued in their struggle with these issues as to be susceptible to resting solutions.
The first is the original Chomsky view of the language acquisition device, LAD, a view that is attributable more to his enthusiastic psychological followers than to Noam Chomsky himself. It holds that the acquisition of the formal, syntactic structure of language is completely independent of either world knowledge or of privileged social interaction with speakers of the language. LAD is essentially a recognition routine by...