Since Chomsky (e.g. 1968, 1972) proposed that linguistics was to be one indispensable part o f cognitive psychology, the ultimate goal o f linguistic research has been set on providing a valid theoiy o f an individual speaker-hearer’s actual mental organization o f his linguistic knowledge. The idea o f language is “a system represented in the mind/brain o f a particular individual” (Chomsky 1988:36). This mentalist stance - language is a psychological phenomenon: - has been one o f the most important and
Chapter 5 — Psycholinguistic Issues
basic insight o f Chomskyan theory o f language, known as internalism. Its prime object is a language “internal” to the individual, i.e. I-language^ rather than the language external to individuals, i.e. E-language. I-language is a technical term introduced later in Chomsky’s work (Chomsky 1986, 1991) to replace the often confusing and frequently misinterpreted term/concept o f “competence” - speaker-hearer’s knowledge o f language (Chomsky 1965). I-language refers specifically to the knowledge o f language Internal (opposed to ‘external’) to, or in the mind-brain of, an Individual
(opposed to ‘collective’) speaker-hearer. It is Intensional (opposed to ‘extensional’) in that first, what matters is the intensional procedures in which it operates rather than some other external and extensional devices capable o f achieving the same result; second, it gives a range o f interpretations to every event it is exposed to. Contrasting with I-language is the externalized language, technically referred to as E-language, which is closely related to the conventional term o f “performance”, but covers a wider, “dubious” domain o f linguistic samples viewed as physical and social phenomenon.
Our prime concern is the nature o f I-language. It is o f paramount importance to display and explain what native speakers know about language and where this knowledge comes ft-om. Since I-language is a mentally represented entity by definition, a research into speaker’s competence inevitably involves investigations o f evidence o f a psychological kind. We cannot look inside one’s grammar, but we can at least make a worthy attempt to introspect our own knowledge o f language. The ultimate piece o f evidence to verify one’s hypothesis about I-language is the linguistic intuitions or judgments o f the native speaker about well-formedness and ill-formedness o f the language. Let us consider one simple example from Smith (1999). Anybody who is a native speaker o f English judges the sentence John speaks English fluently
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“grammatical”. More importantly, everybody agrees unanimously that John speaks fluently English is “ungrammatical”. Such intuitional judgment (often called “negative
knowledge”) has been a hallmark in Chomskyan linguistics that offers the true insight o f one’s profound knowledge o f his/her own language, and possessing such knowledge is what being a native speaker o f the language means. Chomsky is the first to demonstrate the “subtlety” o f human command o f language, and that it is this “unconscious knowledge” or tacit knowledge (e.g. Chomsky 1969) that underlies our ability to speak and understand. Unless you are a linguist or a teacher/student o f English grammar, not everyone is able to explain why they know that John speaks fluently English is ungrammatical. Some may explain that the sequence of “pronoun-verb-adverb-noun” does not occur in English. However, this explains nothing about the reason why native speakers o f English say John speaks English fluently, and are still able to make a negative judgment about more complex examples like This is the man John hired before he spoke to, which could not have been heard or explicitly taught. This is the very point o f the Poverty^fltheStim iU us argument: “why do we end up knowing more than we have learned?” The answer is that we all have built-in structure o f the language faculty from the begiiming. This is UG: “the system o f principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or properties o f all human languages ... the essence o f human language” (Chomsky 1975:29). UG is assumed to be “iimate”, commonly inherited by human beings regardless o f which language they speak. UG comprises a set o f universal principles, a common basis o f all human languages, and values for param eters that specify the possible and limited choices o f variation which language can make. Acquiring a language means setting all the values for parameters appropriately to the language being acquired.
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The description o f I-language provides clues as to what constitutes knowledge o f language. Chomsky (1995:15) hypothesizes that “the I-language consists o f a computational procedure and a Lexicon”. Normal humans can produce and understand any o f an infinite number o f novel forms, phrases and sentences that they have never uttered or heard before. This is done by combining a finite number o f simple units using a finite set o f symbolic rules. This ability (e.g. Chomsky 1965; Chomsky and Halle 1968; Aronoff 1976; Selkirk 1982) gave rise to the theoiy that the human language competence comprises o f two distinct components: central grammatical knowledge or a combinatoiy mental grammar manipulating abstract symbolic representations, and lexical knowledge or the m enial lexicon o f memorized list o f simple units. It would be a misconception to consider that the whole o f I-language is innate. UG theory recognizes that there is a core grammatical competence, namely UQ consisting o f a set o f universal principles and associated parameters and some lexical information on one hand, and additional peripheral knowledge on the other. This includes lexically idiosyncratic forms and other oddities in Ihe lexicon, such as the irregular verbs in English past tense inflection. Such aspects o f the language are considered somewhat mysterious in function, peripheral to UG It follows that what we have to leam from the linguistic inputs we have been directly exposed to is the values for parameters and this peripheral aspect o f language. In other words, both genetic and environmental factors lead the way o f language acquisition in which the learner internalizes I-linguistic generalizations on the basis ofE-linguistic input. Hence, a large part o f I-language, i.e. the ‘core grammar’, is innate, but certain parts o f it have to be learned. In addition, in some circumstances, certain aspects o f a language may be taught explicitly to the learner early enough or consistently enough to become part o f one’s I-language, but it is the learner’s
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‘conscious’ knowledge that influences one’s linguistic judgments based on social-educational (pedagogical) experiences. For example, some native speakers o f English tend to disfavour ‘split infinitives’ as m l wanted to sort o f hit him because they were explicitly taught early at school that it is ungrammatical. Similarly, most Japanese children become familiar with the rdk-particular /h/ ~ /b/ voicing alternation along with other voiced ~ voiceless obstruent pairs as soon as they start reading and writing the
kanasyllabaries by means o f chart citation. Perhaps some teachers o f Japanese feel the need to explain rdk at school, although it is not in the curriculum, as is often the case in foreign language classrooms. Taught knowledge is essentially ‘non-linguistic’, distinct fi*om the central ‘linguistic’ knowledge. Hence, a negative judgment based on taught knowledge is not strictly a ftmction o f the I-language.
A description o f language and language knowledge has nothing but a superficial relationship to the actual speaker’s production/perception processes. The fact that all native speakers o f Japanese conform to forms like ori-gami (‘paper folding’) and
yaki-soba (‘fiied noodles’) instead o f *ori-kami and *yaki-zoba provide no evidence for
or against a linguist’s hypothesis about the I-language. Such performance data may have resulted fi*om the rule internal to his mental grammar or from a ‘frozen’ lexical item stored in memory, or perhaps both. In any case, what we are really interested in is not whether ori-gami and yaki-soba have been said or heard but whether forms like
ori-kami and yaki-zoba could be said, and how would they be judged if they were. However, as mentioned above, searching for hard evidence o f psychological nature is not so easy. Much o f our linguistic knowledge is complex, not easily accessible to consciousness, and is not always amenable to “personal introspection” as well as “public observation”. Intuitional judgments are often considered too ephemeral.
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intangible and subjective to be usable, except when they are under experimental control. Then, the biggest challenge for researchers o f I-language is a methodological one: considerable methodological ingenuity is needed to make the speaker’s knowledge apparent.