"Learning" a language

We always hear about “learning” languages. In my school in Iran, everyone was obliged to “learn” Arabic from the age of ten but almost no one got to speak it fluently after eight years of taking classes. We were all able to identify the verbs, the nouns, the adjectives and so on when given a text but we could not hold the simplest conversations of asking someone about their day. Reading the chapters, I now understand why this was the case. It was exactly because we were “learning” the language. A lot of language is “acquired” as opposed to “learned”. Conscious knowledge (like the ways in which one can distinguish an adverb from an adjective) is learned. Subconscious knowledge however, like how to speak, is acquired. This in part explains why classes in the formal grammar of a foreign language (Arabic in this case) often fail to train people to speak those languages and why being immersed in an environment in which the language is spoken is a more effective way of becoming able to speak the language. 

In addition to parts of language being learned and parts of it being acquired, it was interesting to learn that some facts about Language seem to be built into our brains, or innate. As the reading states, “much of language is an ability hard-wired into our brains by our genes”. Therefore a human facility for language, which we call Universal Grammar, is innate. This part of the reading in addition to the logical problem of language acquisition reminded me of Chomsky’s refutation of the word-chain device as a means of explaining human language. He proved that certain sets of English sentences cannot be produced by a word-chain device. Consider the following sentences:

Either the girl eats ice-cream, or the girl eats candy.

If the girl eats ice-cream, then the boy eats hot dogs.

At first, it seems that there exists a word chain device that can accommodate these sentences. However, if this device were to work, the sentence “Either the girl eats ice-cream, then the girl likes candy” should also be part of the English language. However, this is not the case since this sentence is grammatically incorrect. “Either” should always be followed by “or”. In order to satisfy the desire of a word early in a sentence (e.g. “either”) for some other word late in the sentence (e.g. “or”), the device has to remember the early word while it is churning out all the words in between. This is exactly the problem of such a device. A word-chain device can only remember the word list from which it has just chosen from, nothing earlier. Chomsky gives other arguments as to why a word-chain device is not a suitable explanation for human language. From his arguments we can conclude that a word-chain device which has finite states cannot explain human language which requires a device that has infinitely many states.