“The Poverty of the Stimulus”
Linguists use this phrase to characterize the discrepant
gap between the language environment any child grows
up in, and the exquisite accomplishment of its eventual
linguistic performance. Something innate (instinctual,
Pinker calls it) is built-in, a competence already wired,
an algorithm, say, that generates displays way beyond
the necessary but insufficient stimulus of the surroundings.
:
Poor we have with us always
“The innateness hypothesis receives its strongest support
from the observation that the grammar a person ends up
with is vastly undetermined by his linguistic experience.
In other words, we end up knowing far more about language
than is exemplified in the language we hear around us
Something in this description of language acquisition &
facility calls out for analogy & abduction across inter-
disciplinary lines toward a grammar of Liberal Art, say,
as opposed to the assumed acquisition of liberal arts:
those disciplines,
majors, minors,
requisites, sequences,
capstones—all impoverished stimulus packages
inadequate to account for the “grammar” a person
commands by commencement: vastly under-determined
by syllabi-driven, aims & goals & measurable objectives
that shape one course after another course after another
course after another course— content & subject matter
not with standing. mere stimulus tokens & impoverished
compared to the actual cerebral/ affective abundance one
carries off from
No, really: an embarrassment.
Ask any pursuer of knowledge and intellectual freedom
to tell you the nitty-gritty of the courses he took last
semester, or before that or before that—course after
course after course: courses galore and all the same
deal —different tokens, of course: one becomes expert
on course-taking & the grammar-of-course.
A course is a course is a course.
Although children hear many utterances, the language they
hear is incomplete, noisy, and unstructured. ..exposed to
adult-to-adult interactions that include slips of the tongue,
false starts, ungrammatical and incomplete sentences, and
no consistent information as to which utterances are well-
formed and which are not.
Most important: children come to know aspects of the
grammar about which they receive no information.
In this sense, the data they are exposed to is
impoverished.
It is less than what is necessary to account for the richness
and complexity of the grammar they attain.
(Fromkin, Rodman, Hyams: An Introduction
to Language)
I haven't quite grasped the metaphor I feel lurks in this
description of poverty & stimulus. It's peculating. I'm
brooding.. Thought I'd put it out there, bait for
collaborative genius:--inadequacy begging
for complement.
xxxooo, Sam
No comments:
Post a Comment