Sabrina Finn

Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Edidin, Aron

Area of Concentration

Interdisciplinary Studies of Language

Abstract

What is the nature of language? For more than 60 years, the answer to this question has been drawn from Noam Chomsky’s theory of linguistics, which treats the usage of linguistic structures in a speech community as irrelevant to its purpose, acquisition, and form. But by contrast, contemporary research in philosophy, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics suggests that the purpose, acquisition, and form of linguistic structures are necessarily linked to language’s function. In this project, I assert that functionality is a core property of language, and that the problems faced by the transformationalgenerative theories of language are the result of Chomsky’s intentional disregard for functionality. Using language research from a wide variety of academic disciplines, I contend that grammar and meaning are inextricable from the function of language, and that the hypothesis of the autonomy of grammar is an unsolvable problem in the foundation of Chomsky’s theory. I thus establish the need for an alternative picture of language, which ought to be broadly interdisciplinary, fully explanatory, and adequately descriptive. I describe a basic cognitivefunctional conception of language based in the research discussed throughout the project. Finally, I argue that this alternative depiction of what language is and how language works would benefit linguists and nonlinguists alike better than the Chomskyan conception which has dominated studies of language for decades. Ultimately this project is intended to steer scholars of language onto a path which is not only empirically accurate but also theoretically useful. Linguistics should provide a window not only into the human mind but also into human societies and human behavior, and my portrait of language is intended to achieve this purpose.

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