|
 |
Polyglot linguists | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Al-Irelandi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5534 days ago 111 posts - 177 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 17 of 18 19 May 2012 at 3:29pm | IP Logged |
|
Some general points.
Firstly, Noam Chomsky - multilingual or not- revolutionised linguistics. The field, prior to his works in the late 1950s and 1960s, was largely descriptive. Chomsky argued for generative linguistics which paved the way for a dismissal of behaviourism and the structural linguistics in the area of child L1 learning. His competence and proficiency in multiple languages, or the lack of, hardly undermines his breakthrough that children have an underlying rule based system that governs their language use and is capable of generating an infinite number of utterances on a number of finite rules. This notion is in contrast to earlier behaviourist models that simplified language acquisition (child or adult, L1 or L2) as occurring by way of learners merely repeating that which they heard around them, with no account to explain the processes involved. Secondly, linguistics is a large field, and in some sub-fields having a proficiency in specific languages is of great importance whereas in others it may not necessarily be the case. Thirdly, structural linguistics was limited in its application on second language acquisition and learning. Many of the predictions the behaviourist-influenced structuralist linguist Lado (1957) made in 'Contrastive Analysis' about the types of language features that should be able easily transfer to another language sharing them were shown to be unfounded. This was made evident in the kinds of 'errors' that learners made when acquiring a given L2, regardless of their L1s features being shared by the L2 or not. Such learners tended to make similar errors and go through a similar developmental process, as in the case of the order of certain morphemes being acquired in the process of acquiring English, undetermined by their L1. In all, some of the comments that are made about Chomsky and linguistics are unfounded. Without following his work on the subject -which spans back to the late 1950s- and having an overview of linguistics, much what is going to be said about the two will be mere speculation. At least one should bring some quote of what he has said and let us analyse them as opposed to misconstruing what he did or didn't say. In fact, Chomsky has had relatively little to say about L2 acquisition or even L1 acquisition. His main concern is how language is represented in the mind, as opposed to the processes that the learner goes through in building up such a representation. Edited by Al-Irelandi on 19 May 2012 at 3:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Gorgoll2 Senior Member Brazil veritassword.blogspo Joined 5145 days ago 159 posts - 192 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 18 of 18 19 May 2012 at 10:06pm | IP Logged |
|
On Everett, I think Portuguese is sine qua non: Many indigenous tribes speak only
Portuguese here. And even among the brazilian elites, English is not very known - I wouldn ´t advise a non-Portuguese speaking to live here. 1 person has voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
