The name is absent

17

fact that the grammatical structures of the two languages often seem to run in opposite directions.
In English, one says “in Istanbul,” while in Turkish, one says “Istanbul’da.” Where there is a
preposition in English, “at,” there is a corresponding postposition in Turkish. In other words, the
adpositions in English are prepositions, occurring before their complements; while adpositions in
Turkish are postpositions, occurring after their complements. Adpositional phrases in English
are prepositional phrases. Those in Turkish are postpositional. Far from commonality, the
impression here is one of perfect opposites.

One finds similar differences as one continues to consider other parts of the grammars of
the two languages. Consider verb phrases: In English, one commands another by saying “Speak
Turkish.” In Turkish, one makes the same demand by saying “Turkle konu§.” In other words, in
verb phrases, the head of the phrase, i.e. the element characterizing the phrase, the verb in the
case of verb phrases, occurs at the beginning in English while occurring at the end in Turkish.
One finds a similar difference with regard to noun phrases and adjectival phrases.

Despite initial impressions, we have seen a pattern here, namely that English grammar is
consistently head-first, while Turkish grammar is consistently head-last. And for Chomsky, the
linguistic universal is precisely this: Any natural language is either consistently head-first or
consistently head-last (4). According to Chomsky, the small child only needs to hear a few
phrases of the ambient language to know that it is head-first or head-last.

When the child is acquiring a particular language, a parameter is set in the child’s
mind/brain, a parameter being a specification of options which can be fixed in one of a small
number of predetermined ways. The principles are innate, the parameters settings are learned.
On P&P, it is a main goal of linguistics to discover the principles such that specifying the
parameters will produce a good approximation of the grammar of each natural language. An
internal language is not governed by rules specific to that language, at least not in the sense of

<<   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   >>

More intriguing information