Carnie Made Me Believe That Universal Grammar Helped Me Write This Post

This week’s reading from Carnie was thought-provoking in a paradoxical sense because it  makes language and syntax seem digestible and exact and open-ended and infinite. 

He begins earlier in the reading by discussing prescriptive rules and descriptive rules. Prescriptive are those that are given as the “correct” way of speaking, and are often what we think of when it comes to “grammar.: I particularly tend to favor these because they make language seem exact and fairly manageable, unlike descriptive rules, because they are studying how people actually speak, a much more broadly varying and unpredictable set. It makes the concept of approaching understanding syntax, when focusing on descriptive rules, a lot more daunting and seemingly nuanced.

After this, though, he begins describing syntax trees, and with the exact nature of them it seems once again like all of language can be broken down in very simple and straightforward ways. But then even here in the diagramming specificity of understanding syntax and sentence, Carnie describes just how varying and changing these rules can be depending on context, such as with the nuanced differences between “The man killed the king with the knife,” a simple sentence whose diagram is actually significantly different based on interpretation (who has the knife? and furthermore, how do we tell the difference in meaning, via the phonology of the words as discussed in last week’s reading?). Seeing such complexity in such a simple sentence it just makes me realize how many different ways there are understand language, considering how complex even everyday language we hear at school is (or the complexity needed to write this blog!).

Due to this mentioned complexity, I think Chomsky’s concept of Universal Grammar and an inborn sense of language is very probable and justified (among the other similar reasons discussed about the complex, infinite nature of grammatical problems). I had never before heard of this concept and was initially skeptical but the sheer specificity and detail needed to understand each example sentence in the reading alone in pure syntax proves to me that parental instruction/education/other external forms of language learning cannot be all that is at play in acquisition.