Volume 27, Number 16 · October 23, 1980
Chomsky and His Critics
By Ian Hacking
Rules and Representations
by Noam Chomsky
Columbia University Press, 299 pp., $14.95
Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky
edited by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Harvard University Press, 352 pp., $20.00
From time to time, ever since Plato, grammar has been more than the bane of schoolchildren or a topic for scholars. It owes its present prominence outside linguistics to some theses stated twenty-five years ago by Noam Chomsky. There is, he said, a universal grammar common to all human languages. Children are born with it: their inheritance explains the ease with which they pick up the language they hear around them. Universal grammar is like an organ of the body whose structure is genetically determined. It is a characteristic of the human mind and an essential part of the discontinuity between people and beasts.
Review, 4443 words
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