
38: Generativism 2: How It's Going (with Taylor Miller and Adam Tallman)
Because Language - a podcast about linguistics, the science of language.
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Generatism and the Origins of Language, Right?
Chomsky's idea of nativism is that there was this innate language faculty in humans. Then he had this idea of treating language like a computer, you know, inspired by the Turing machine and that you could generate infinite possibilities from a finite set of tools. And then from those things, you get infinity where you have linguistic creativity and all these different languages. But so it has to do with the origin of language, which is the big question, right? Is it this innate idea or is it like we happen to have these skills and they got repurposed for language like at the core of it?"
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