Quote:
Originally Posted by alienvoord  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. |
Actually, I don't; I construe them as meaning the same thing. If I wanted to ask who you wanted to see fighting, I would ask "Who do you want to see fighting?" (or "Who do you wanna see fighting?"). Or something similar. Mainly because otherwise I would risk being misunderstood. "Wanna" merely represents a pronunciation of "want to" where the particle "to" is reduced somewhat; the sentence is pronounced this way because this is the normal reading of it (and means "Who do you want to be in a fight with?"). If you wish to impart a different meaning to the same sentence, you have to use intonation to avoid ambiguity. This means you have to pronounce the whole thing more clearly than you might otherwise pronounce it, and this would account for writing "want to". And to me it sounds unnatural and contrived in this sentence.
My objection to all of this is the implication that somehow, we don't have to learn any of this stuff. That is what is implied by the word "innate" -- the rules are already there when we are born.
I have seen theories of a deep (innate) grammar where all languages can be reduced to a dozen or so concepts. Now, there may or may not be something in that, but I don't see how we can possibly verify that. In any case, all it means is that we can reduce all languages to half a dozen concepts; it doesn't mean that those concepts are at all innate, or even that our brains really do use this "universal grammar" at all. Humans are very good at finding patterns, but that doesn't mean that that is how things really work.
If you want to use learning to walk as an analogy for learning a language, that's sort of OK. Most of us can walk, and the ability seems genuinely innate. However, being able to walk is no guarantee that you are able to run a four-minute mile, play football or ride a bicycle.
Finally, if I want to criticise a theory, I am under no obligation to advance an alternative theory. It is enough to show that a theory does not adequately explain observed phemonema. Einstein did not use his Theory of Relativity to debunk Newton's Laws of Nature; he proposed his Theory of Relativity because other scientists had already discovered that Newton's laws failed to predict the orbit of Mercury.