FALL 2007 HONORS COURSES

HONR 218L Language and Mind
Tuesday/Thursday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Professor Norbert Hornstein, Department of Linguistics

Fish swim, birds fly, people speak. No one would think to deny that fish are biologically built for swimming and birds for flying. Nature has genetically endowed these creatures with special-purpose faculties which undergird these capacities. Linguists have argued for the past twenty-five years that the same holds for humans and language, in particular, that humans have a specific genetically-endowed dedicated capacity to acquire and use language. The aim of this course is to investigate the evidence for this claim.

We consider several types of evidence. The first part focuses on the logical problem of language acquisition. What evidentiary problems does the child face in acquiring its native language? What is the object acquired? What's a grammar? What evidence does a child use in building its grammar? To help get a handle on these rather abstract questions, we consider how kids come to acquire the grammars that they do by investigating some grammatical constructions in detail and formulating the rules that native speakers tacitly employ in judging various properties of these constructions. We then work backwards to figure out how knowledge of these constructions and rules could be attained by the child. What sort of innate endowment (if any) is required to get the child from its initial state of ignorance to the final state of grammatical competence. What sort of evidence does it have access to? What sort of data can it use in acquiring its native language?

Next we examine data from other areas that bear on this issue. We take a look at some child language data, neurolinguistic data, cross species data, the language of feral (wild) children, historical linguistic data, and cross species linguistic data. The goal is to see how much consilience there is between the conclusions arrived at by grammatical investigation and those arrived at by other means.

CORE–Humanities [HO]