Today was a casual day for me! I didn’t have any meetings, so I had the chance to hang up my hammock and start reading the book Dr. Terry lent to me, Patterns in the Mind: Language in Human Nature. I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve read so far; this book is a great introduction to the fundamental arguments made in modern linguistics: the Argument for Mental Grammar, the Argument for Innate Knowledge, and the Argument for the Construction of Experience.
Up until the 1950s, American psychologists followed a “behaviorist” view of the way the mind worked, positing that babies come into the world knowing almost nothing and grow to learn from surrounding environments and behaviors. In the late 1950s, a linguist from MIT named Noam Chomsky published work that asserted that the behaviorists’ argument was simplistic and the human language behavior can only be explained through complex principles in the speaker’s mind. Chomsky effectively revolutionized the field of linguistics, allowing us to think of the mind as a sort of complex, biological computer and breathing life into the study of the mind in all disciplines.
If my lovely blog posts have sparked a burgeoning interest in language for you, I’d definitely recommend picking up this book– it seems like a really good place to start. Looking forward to another week of discovery come Monday!!