An Epistemological Overview of Innateness and Language

Epistemologically point of view, the source of human language has been scrutinized from various perspectives and this quest has proliferated a plethora of theories to account for this complex issue. As the most leading linguist of the second half of twentieth century, Chomsky revolutionized linguistics by his propositions on the innate knowledge of human language, raising a host of debates among contemporary scholars (See, Chomsky, 1191). In this brief review initially, a group of historical theories to explicate the source of language are presented. Next, the ideologies of nativism, empiricism, constructivism, emergentism, connectionists, evolutionary psychology and those of usage-based theory on innateness are discussed. As far as the theme of innateness is concerned, it is suggested that this concept be considered with more malleability rather than ossification

کلیدواژه ها:

connectionism ، emergentism ، empiricism ، constructivism ، evolutionary psychology ، epistemology of language ، innateness ، nativism ، usage-based theory