Blog 6

I thought this chapter was very interesting. I especially enjoyed the parts about the acquisition of language in very young children. I never really stopped to think about that before. I have no children of my own, and I was much too young at the time to remember anything from experience. It seems so daunting, but we all learned at least one language growing up. The prospect of being placed in a non-English-speaking country without any prior knowledge of the language is frightening to me, and yet, at the very outset of our lives, that is what happened. When we learned to speak, we picked up words, phrases, usages, and sentence structure just by listening. I can no longer find the page, but somewhere in the chapter it mentions that we do not hear sentences and repeat them to get our point across to our audience. Instead, we autonomously put pieces of a language together to form our own ideas.

When we were in class a few weeks ago, the question arose about the difference between two of Noam Chomsky's passages that seemed contradictory. In class, I felt as if I could understand the differences between the two quotes and I did not think they conflicted, but I could not successfully put my reasoning into words. There is a quote on page 166, however, that I think sums up the difference nicely. Williams writes, "Linguists have long noted that "acquiring" language is different from "learning" it. Acquisition involves the unconscious assimilation of language, whereas learning involves the conscious mastery of knowledge about language." I like the way this passage is phrased, and I like the point that it makes. We acquire language at a young age through our surroundings, but it takes conscious effort to hone our abilities.

-edit to add-

I recently began reading a work by Noam Chomsky called Powers and Prospects, and in it, Chomsky continues the idea of acquiring language at a young age and using it autonomously to form new thoughts and new sentences. He writes, "This 'notion of structure' in the mind of the speaker finds its way there without instruction. There would be no way to teach it to anyone, even if we knew what it is; parents certainly don't, and linguists have only limited understanding of what is a very hard problem, only recently studied beyond the surface of phenomena. The 'notion of structure' somehow grows in the mind, providing the means for infinite use, for the ability to form and comprehend free expressions" (7-8). I think this quote also goes along with the seeming contradiction discussed in class about Chomsky's views on both acquiring language and teaching/learning language. To reiterate the point I mentioned in the paragraph above, we learn through submersion, but we refine through instruction.