From Studyplace

Critique of Chomksy and Nativism:

Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence

Here is a thumbnail sketch of the shift from nativism to a broader view of language:

The Chomskyan revolution has had a great impact on the way many linguists in the U.S. study language. Chomsky's formal theory focuses on linguistic competence, the capacity of the human mind to generate "all and only the sentences of a given language."

Those concerned about linguistic theory as applied to communicative and educational issues prefer to focus on linguistic performance. This group of linguists argues that language is not simply something one extracts from the mind, and that linguistic rules do not capture fully the construction of meaning. In other words, the generative rules so important to nativists fail to account for the functions of language.

In the U.S., Dell Hymes challenged formal linguistics by saying there is more to language than linguistic competence; humans also acquire communicative competence, which is the knowledge and skills a person needs to know in order to communicate appropriately in a particular speech community. For Hymes, John Gumperz and others, what language is cannot be separated from how and why it is used.

Interestingly, linguists from other parts of the world were not so distracted by the nativist view as were those in North America. The Prague School of Linguistics^[1] (associated with linguists Jacobson and Vachek) and the London School of Linguistics (associated with J. R. Firth) have taken a functional view of language.

Enter M.A.K. Halliday.

A product of the London School, Halliday wrote an important volume in 1973 called Explorations in the Functions of Language. As you have seen in the first chapter of Language, Context and Text, the notion of context is the key to participating in and making sense of social interaction. We will focus on the Hallidayan approach to language use/language learning for the remainder of the course. It is important to know that many researchers studying multimodality and computers like Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen base much of their work on Halliday.

1. ↑ Did you know that Columbia University was one of the few places in the U.S. in which the Prague School's approach to the study of language was taken seriously? Unfortunately, it died when the University closed down the linguistics department.