Talk, talk

摘要

For half a century an influential group of Western linguists, led by Noam Chomsky, have argued that language is an innate human faculty, the product of a "language organ" in the mind. Other prominent "innatists" include Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist and author of "The Language Instinct", and Derek Bickerton, a linguist at the University of Hawaii and developer of a "bioprogramme" theory of language. Innatists believe that all languages share fundamental features. And linguistic innatism is part of a wider debate about just how much of human nature is wired into the brain.