[alienvoord]

Originally Posted by rewboss

Actually, I think Chomsky's argument is considerably weakened if these rules are not innate. If they are not innate they must come from somewhere -- they don't just pop into existence.

OK, but what are we talking about now? Are you objecting to transformational grammar because you believe that these rules are not innate?

A native speaker's understanding of grammar is unconscious, yes, but it has still been learned. If you drive a car, especially if you have been doing so for a long time, you do a lot of it instinctively, and you don't usually have to think very hard; however, you still had to learn to drive. (It's not a perfect analogy, of course, since when we learn to drive we do so by formal instruction first and then our skills are fine-tuned by experience, but it still illustrates the point.)

I think a better analogy is learning to walk.

What you're basically saying is that we humans have the ability to formulate highly complex and subtle rules even though they are unable to explain them, and without being conscious of the process. But that doesn't mean that these rules do not have to be learnt.

This is where we get carried away by terminology if we are not careful. The moment we hear the word "unconscious", we understand "instinctive", and when we hear "instinctive", we understand "innate" and therefore "doesn't have to be learned".

Maybe that's what you think when you hear "unconscious," but I didn't say any of that. You haven't convinced me that they are or are not innate, or that it matters at the level of talking about case and coordinated pronouns. In the same way, perhaps, that biologists are not concerned with the origins of life when talking about evolution.

And if all languages do have superficial similarities -- all languages having verbs, for example -- that doesn't mean much.

I think you've got it backwards. One of the points of transformational grammar is that languages are superficially different, and are the same at a deeper level.

Your example about German word order has been used to demonstrate points of transformational grammar.

The fact is that we construe "who do you want to fight?" and "who do you wanna fight?" as having different meanings, without being able to articulate why this is so, and without being explicitly taught how to tell the difference. We have to account for that, and for many other pieces of data like it. Transformational grammar accounts for it.

If you want to object to transformational grammar, fine, but be aware that you're talking about several decades of mainstream linguistic theory. That doesn't mean that it's right, but it means that it has a lot of prononents and a lot of explanatory power. If you have an alternative theory, your theory has to account for everything that transformatlional grammar accounts for.