How people acquire language – A new research project examining a linguistic construction called the verb second constraint could, academics believe, help to explain how people acquire language. It’s safe to assume that when Winston Churchill gave one of his most famous speeches in August 1940, the possible existence of universal grammar was far from his mind.
Nevertheless, it now appears that phrases such as “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” could hold the key to understanding how humans acquire language from birth.
The sentence features a remnant of something called the “verb second” constraint; a linguistic construction which appears in most Germanic languages, but has disappeared from Romance (Latin-based) grammars, such as Spanish or French.
In simple terms, verb second, or “V2” languages are, as the name suggests, defined by the fact that the verb tends to take second place in a sentence. Understanding why the principle was abandoned by one language family, but retained by the other, is the central objective of a new project that is being carried out by an international team of language scientists from the Universities of Cambridge and Oslo, among others.
The researchers believe that the verb second constraint could be used to test Noam Chomsky’s famous, but contested, idea of universal grammar. The theory, developed in the 1950s, argues that humans acquire language because we possess an innate, hard-wired ability to do so.
Sam Wolfe, from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics and St John’s College, University of Cambridge, said: “If we want to know whether or not universal grammar exists, we need to model what is actually going on inside our heads when we learn a language, so that we can better understand the toolbox we all make use of. The question is, how do you do that? One solution is to study language properties that might give us a clue, and the verb second constraint seems to be one of the best examples available – a lens to test that theory.”
Learn more about this topic by reading this article on Phys.
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