ON THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE AS A COGNITIVE CAPACITY

Linguistics in the second half of the XX century is marked by the cognitive revolution, profoundly influenced and partly triggered by Chomsky’s ideas. Universal Grammar (UG) is the key concept for the investigation of human language in a naturalistic setting; it can be construed as a theory of the species-specific biological endowment for language, an abstract model of the initial cognitive state. UG can be studied by integrating different kinds of evidence: “poverty of the stimulus” arguments, comparative linguistics and language development. In the last twenty years, “Principles and Parameters” models of Universal Grammar have renewed comparative syntax and the study of language acquisition. (to be added a section on the Minimalist Program). 1. A NATURALISTIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE AND MIND. Linguistics in the second half of the century is marked by the cognitive revolution, which was in turn profoundly influenced and partly triggered by Chomsky’s ideas on language and mind. These ideas renewed the study of language by redefining objects and methods of linguistic inquiry. At the beginning of the century, the attempt to define the object of the discipline had led Ferdinand de Saussure to draw a distinction between "langue" and "faculté du langage". Saussure’s "langue" is ". un ensemble de conventions nécessaires adoptées par le corps social pour permettre l'usage de la faculté du langage chez les individus. ", "un produit social de la faculté du langage", an entity which is only partially represented in an individual mind/brain (".elle n'existe parfaitement que dans la masse."); on the other hand, the language faculty is "une faculté que nous tenons de la nature, . un instinct naturel. " (Saussure 1985, passim), in modern terminology, a species-specific and task-specific cognitive capacity. Saussure then went on to build his approach to linguistics based on the study of "langue". About half a century later, Noam Chomsky proposed to go the other way, and centered his reflection on language on the study of the language faculty. The idea of focusing on the language faculty was not new. The broader perspective of studying language as a "mirror of the mind", as a domain offering a privileged access to the study of the human cognitive capacities, had been consistently pursued in the history of the rational inquiry on language. Nevertheless, Chomsky was the first to show that the scientific study of the language faculty was a feasible enterprise: it could be conducted through the use of precise formal models of language knowledge, language acquisition and language use, models possessing a non-trivial deductive structure, rich in heuristic value and accessible to a variety of modes of empirical validation (Chomsky 1957, 1959, 1965). This is the essence of the "Chomskian revolution": the language faculty is accessible to study in the "Galilean style", the style of inquiry which established itself in the natural sciences since the XVII century; the ramifications of this approach have extended well beyond the boundaries of technical linguistics and have profoundly influenced the cognitive studies in the second half of this century.