by the universal grammar. According to Chomsky (1995, 2000), these four parts
work together in fairly complex ways that allow us to produce language. Thus,
language acquisition in the minimalist program consists of the following stages:
- At birth the language faculty contains the universal grammar.
- Birth immerses the infant in the home-language environment, which “fixes”
the parameters of the universal grammar so they are consistent with the gram-
mar of the home language. - Immersion also provides the child with a lexicon, a list of individual words
with real-world correlates. - Language production consists of selecting words from the lexicon and putt-
ing them into logical and phonetic form.
The MP account of acquisition solves the problems associated with acqui-
sition. If children are born with the core components of grammar, they will
encounter little difficulty in induction from limited and distorted input. The
reason is straightforward: The child already “knows” the language, so pov-
erty of input will not be a detriment to acquisition; likewise, distorted input
will be filtered out by the parameters of the universal grammar and will have
no effect on acquisition.
The Computational System
The computational system is a key feature of the MP. Chomsky (1995) pro-
posed that this system selects items from the lexicon and assigns them a logical
and a phonetic form. The logical form contains meaning, and the phonetic form
is a manifestation of sound correspondences. We can imagine how the process
might work by considering a word likebad,which can mean bad or good, de-
pending on context and inflection. The computational system would calculate
the context, select the wordbad,and assign the appropriate meaning. We
should note, however, that although the logical form of words with semantic
content is reasonably clear—we might consider it to be a concatenated series of
propositions and attributes—it is not at all clear for function words that have
significantly less semantic content.
In the model of language acquisition outlined here, the computational sys-
tem, or something like it, is inevitable. If the language faculty indeed merely
sorts through all available grammar patterns, minimal “learning” is involved.
The real cognitive work of language production must consist of selecting the
right words, with all their myriad attributes, and putting them in the correct
form. Some kind of sorting and processing ability—if not mechanism—would
be required to do this.
186 CHAPTER 5