Besides the debate over modularity versus connectionism, there are two other conflicting assumptions, very much related to them, namely the issue of innate or acquired concepts. The supporters of the thesis that most of the conceptual system is innate are called ‘nativists’ and the adherents of the theory that it is mostly acquired concepts are called ‘empiricists’. Chomsky (1967), Fodor (1975, 2008), Jackendoff (1992) and Pinker (1994) and many others support the
nativist conceptions. Their studies pioneered the nativistic approach and their view has dominated the debate over the last decades. They proposed a universal innate grammar, which enables a child to understand and produce language. For Chomsky, the task of the linguist is to describe this universal human ability, known as language competence, with a grammar from which the grammars of all languages can be derived. The linguist’s task is to develop this universal grammar (UG) by looking at the rules children use in hearing and speaking their first language. This would explain the universality and rapidity of language acquisition. Knowing certain rules, a child can easily transfer them without having to learn them one by one. Exposure to specific samples of speech in infancy allows the child to determine the particular principles of the Universal Grammar (UG) that are relevant to the language being acquired. Fodor (1975, 1983) claims a position known as radical concept nativism, i.e. all lexical concepts are innate. To Fodor the medium of thought is an innate language (‘mentalese’) that is independent from all spoken or signed languages.
Language must be treated as completely separate from other human cognitive abilities. No factors from outside the linguistic system can affect the rules of that system. For Chomsky (1975), language serves essentially for the expression of thought, and Jackendoff (1997, p.180) argues that thought is a mental function completely separate from language and that it can go on in the absence of language. “The picture that emerges [...] is that although language expresses thought, thought itself is a separate brain phenomenon” (1997, p. 185). “Language is just a vehicle for externalizing thoughts, it isn’t the thoughts themselves” (1997, p. 196). The Chomskyan linguistics propose that all natural languages have the same underlying cognitive structures and the language itself and each of its components, i.e. the lexicon, the phonology, the syntax, and the semantics, is autonomous of the others.
The impact of these nativistic claims was strong. With this approach, linguists were
‘allowed’ to consider each aspect of a language separately, without having first to understand how all the aspects fit together and how they are related to the rest of the cognitive system. Chomsky developed a modeling tool for describing each aspect of language and it seemed as if the problem of language was solvable. Based on the ‘universalists’ assumptions, decades of intense modeling efforts ensued. Unfortunately, as Levine and Postal (2004) criticize, the autonomy claim of the modular approach has been elevated to the status of a doctrine; and rather than seeing the
‘nativists’ proposals as a set of simplifying assumptions that are intended to help analyze a complex system, they have been taken as truths about the nature of language. Chomskyan linguists routinely argue that language is a completely self-contained innate system, with genetically pre-programmed modules that interact with each other and other cognitive processes only through well-defined interfaces. Interlinguistic differences thus have no bearing on thought
itself. In the words of Jackendoff “[...] thinking is largely independent of what language one happens to think in. A French speaker or a Turkish speaker can have essentially the same thoughts as an English speaker can – they’re just in French or Turkish. The point of translation between languages is to preserve the thought behind the expression. If different languages can express the same thought, then thoughts cannot be embalmed in the form of any single language: they must be neutral with respect to what language they are expressed in” (1996, p. 6). “I say essential here in order to hedge on possible 'whorfian effects'” (1996, S.31).
However, unlike the Chomskyan linguists the cognitive linguists have moved away from treating language as an innate rule-based formal system and are looking for external explanations for linguistic phenomena. Lakoff & Johnson (research on metaphor, categories and prototypes., see section 1.1.2), Langacker (cognitive grammar framework), Talmy (work on figure and ground), Fauconnier (mental spaces) and others attempt to describe linguistic phenomena in ways that are consistent with and motivated by what is known about the human brain. Today, there are many researchers, who work in accord with this neurological paradigm, and they produced a huge amount of published evidence which questions the theories of Chomskyan linguistic. The aim of 'cognitive linguistics' is to build a theory of language that is consistent with current knowledge about the mind and the brain. It has not arisen fully-specified from a single source and it has no crystallized formalism as does the computational approach. There is a set of core concepts and goals, most of which are shared by most cognitive linguists, as well as by the philosophers, psychologists, and other scholars who have collaborated on the development of this framework.
These concepts are not the product of an imposed theory, but have instead emerged from empirical observations confirmed across languages and disciplines. Rather than inventing a new kind of rule-system for every aspect of language, cognitive linguists think that language and cognition are based on everyday experience and, at the same time, are a part of mental functioning. In the words of Langacker (2000): “Generative theory has always tried to minimize what a speaker has to learn and mentally represent in acquiring language. Its minimalism was originally based on economy: the best grammar was the one that did the job with the fewest symbols. In recent years, the emphasis has shifted to positing a richly specified universal grammar, so that the role of experience in learning a language involves little more than the setting of parameters. By contrast, Cognitive Grammar accepts that becoming a fluent speaker involves a prodigious amount of actual learning, and tries to minimize the postulation of innate structures specific to language. I consider this to be an empirical issue." (Langacker, 2000, p. 1-2). The main feature that distinguishes cognitive linguistics from generative grammar has to do with the place of language and meaning in the theory. As previously described in the generative model the
structure of linguistic expressions is seen to be determined by a formal rule system which is innate and largely independent of meaning. Cognitive linguists however argue that a particular linguistic expression is associated with a particular way of conceptualizing a given situation. This leads cognitivists to an ‘empiricist view’ regarding language and thought and thus they are very skeptical about the ‘nativist view’ that there is a specific organ in the human brain devoted exclusively to language. They assume that language is not autonomous from general cognition and the conceptual system is not seen as separated from language. Rather, all linguistic items and structures are conceived as meaningful. Conceptual categorization as treated by cognitive linguists does not focus on what is ‘true’ in the world; instead, it focuses on the conceptual system of the language user. A word or utterance triggers a piece of conceptual structure. Thus, the noun
‘cat’ triggers the knowledge we have about domestic cats; in particular, it draws attention to our category of ‘cats’, and especially to a prototypical member of that category. ‘The cat is on the tree’
provides the conceptual cues we need to construct a mental image of a situation where ‘a cat’
and a ‘tree’, already salient in the discourse, exist in a particular prototypical spatial arrangement.
To cognitivists, meaning is neither based on objective reality nor is it completely arbitrary and subjective. Instead, concepts are grounded in our experiences as embodied beings (Lakoff &
Johnson, 1999). All humans share the same kind of sensory organs, neural structures, and bodily experiences. These experiences shape the kinds of concepts that one develops and that one attaches to linguistic items. Semantics, concepts connected with language, are not separable from all our kinds of knowledge. It incorporates many of the structures in the conceptual system. The most successful models of human knowledge group the knowledge into substructures, e.g., Schank and Abelson`s (1977) scripts, Fillmore`s frames (1982), Lakoff`s (1987) idealised cognitive models and Langacker`s (2000) schemata. All these terms refer to the fact that concepts tend to cluster together in related groups. Thus, cognitive linguists believe don’t believe in an innate autonomous linguistic faculty or module in the mind, which is autonomous from the rest of cognition. The generating of meaning is embodied and situated in a specific environment. It is a product of the interaction between language and experience/ knowledge, and thus language and thought mutually influence one another. Different language structures may lead to distinct conceptual structures, which is contradictory to the universality of conceptual structures. Since language is a cognitive device, it has a knowledge categorization function, and so it should influence human expectations. Meanings provide us with mental categories into which we order our experiences, or in other words, we are likely to experience the world in terms of categories supplied to us by the concepts in our language. This approach relates to the ‘Linguistic Relativity Principle’ also known as ‘Sapir-Whorf-Hypothesis’. It was Lakoff (1987), who renewed interest in
the relationship between language and thought, and meanwhile most of the embodied theories of mind adopted a moderate Whorfian approach.