Universal Grammar in Second-Language Acquisition: A History

271 Pages·2004·1.17 MB·English

by  Margaret Thomas

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR IN SECOND
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION:
A HISTORY
From the ancient Mediterranean world to the present day, our conceptions of
what is universal in language have interacted with our experiences of language
learning. This book tells two stories: the story of how scholars in the west have
conceived of the fact that human languages share important properties despite
their obvious differences; and the story of how westerners have understood the
nature of second or foreign language learning.
In narrating these two stories, the author argues that modern second
language acquisition theory needs to reassess what counts as its own past. The
book addresses Greek contributions to the prehistory of universal grammar,
Roman bilingualism, the emergence of the first foreign language grammars in
the early Middle Ages, and the Medieval speculative grammarians’ efforts to
define the essentials of human language.
The author shows how after the Renaissance expanded people’s awareness of
language differences, scholars returned to the questions of universals in the
context of second language learning, including in the 1660 Port-Royal grammar
which Chomsky notoriously celebrated in Cartesian Linguistics. The book then
looks at how post-Saussurean European linguistics and American structuralism
up to modern generative grammar have each differently conceived of universals
and language learning.
Universal Grammar in Second Language Acquisition is a remarkable contribution to
the history of linguistics, and will be essential reading for students and scholars
of linguistics, specialists in second language acquisition and language teacher-
educators.
Margaret Thomas is Associate Professor in the Program in Linguistics at
Boston College. She is the author of Knowledge of Reflexives in a Second Language
(1993), and has published articles in Language, Studies in Second Language Acquisition,
Second Language Research, The Linguistic Reviewand Historiographia Linguistica.
ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF
LINGUISTICS
Series Editor: Talbot Taylor
1 LINGUISTICS AND THE THIRD REICH
Mother-tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language
Christopher M. Hutton
2 WOMEN, LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS
Three American Stories from the First Half of the Twentieth Century
Julia S. Falk
3 ETHNOCENTRISM AND THE ENGLISH DICTIONARY
Phil Benson
4 THE BATTLE OVER SPANISH BETWEEN 1800 AND 2000
Language Ideologies and Hispanic Intellectuals
Edited by José del Valle and Luis Gabriel-Stheeman
5 TOWARD A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS
E. F. K. Koerner
6 VICO’S NEW SCIENCE OF ANCIENT SIGNS
A Study of Sematology
Jürgen Trabant
7 UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
A History
Margaret Thomas
UNIVERSAL
GRAMMAR IN
SECOND LANGUAGE
ACQUISITION
A history
Margaret Thomas
First published 2004
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
© 2004 Margaret Thomas
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN 0-203-41639-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-34071-X (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0–415–31037–7 (Print Edition)
iv
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements viii
1 Introduction 1
Some basic definitions 1
Universal grammar 2
Second language acquisition 5
Three caveats 6
Continuity and discontinuity in notions of universal grammar 6
Explicit and implicit concepts of second language learning 7
Historiographical position of this text 8
Why study the history of universal grammar and second language
acquisition? 9
Programmatic ahistoricity 9
Possible sources of ahistoricity 12
Benefits of achieving historical self-awareness 15
What is it that a discipline loses, if it ‘loses’ its history? 17
About this book 18
2 Ancient Greece and Rome 21
Greece 21
‘Barbarian’ languages and the ancient Greeks 22
Greek contributions to the pre-history of universal grammar 23
Rome 25
Second language learning in ancient Rome 28
Roman comparative grammar 32
Summary 33
3 Languages and language learning from late antiquity
to the Carolingian renaissance 35
Language and languages in early Christianity 35
The Tower of Babel and second language learning 35
v
CONTENTS
Christianity and language study 37
Augustine 38
The first foreign language grammars 42
Between the ancient world and the Middle Ages 42
Latin as an L2 43
What did early medieval learners acquire, when they acquired an L2? 46
Summary 48
4 The Middle Ages 50
Grammar realigned and redefined 50
Grammar in its disciplinary neighbourhood 50
Grammar as a speculative science 53
Speculative grammar 55
Medieval universal grammar 56
Modistic and generative versions of universal grammar 61
Roger Bacon 63
Second language learning in the age of speculative grammar 66
Foreign languages and foreign language learning in the Middle Ages 66
Medieval second language pedagogy 69
On the commerce between speculative grammar and L2 acquisition 71
Summary 73
5 From discovery of the particular to seventeenth-century
universal languages 75
Renaissance ‘discovery of the particular’ 76
Abandonment of speculative grammar 77
Changing status of the vernacular languages 78
Grammar and grammars from the Renaissance to the early 1600s 82
Babel discovered at home 83
Babel discovered abroad 84
Babel revisited in critique of the grammatical tradition 85
Second language learning and the teaching of foreign languages 88
Conceptualization of native and non-native languages 88
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century grammar- and usage-based
language instruction 91
L2 pedagogy and Renaissance concepts of L2 acquisition 95
Reinvestment in the universal: seventeenth-century universal languages 98
What might it mean to learn a universal language 101
Summary 102
6 General grammar through the nineteenth century 103
Reinvestment in the universal: general and rational grammar 104
vi
The grammatical works of Port-Royal 105
General grammar and “Cartesian linguistics” 109
Elaboration and critique of general and rational grammar in the
European Enlightenment 120
Leibniz 120
Locke and Condillac 121
Du Marsais and Beauzée 123
Harris and Horne Tooke 125
General and rational grammar in perspective 127
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conceptualization of
second language learning 128
Before general grammar 129
Rationalist and universalist concepts of L2 learning 130
Du Marsais and Beauzée on L2 learning 132
Rationalist and universalist concepts of L2 learning in retreat 134
Nineteenth-century comparative-historical linguistics 136
Wilhelm von Humbolt 138
Language teaching and learning in the 1800s 141
Summary 146
7 Conceptualization of universal grammar and
second language learning in the twentieth century 148
The ‘Saussurean paradigm’ 149
Europe after Saussure 151
Otto Jespersen’s philosophy of grammar 152
Schools of European structuralism 155
The Prague School 157
American structuralist linguistics 159
Two perspectives on American structuralism from 1900 to 1960 160
Second language learning and American structuralist linguistics 169
Contrastive analysis 173
Late twentieth-century linguistic theory and the conceptualization
of second language learning 177
Corder’s insight 178
Greenbergian language universals and Chomskyan universal grammar 179
Late twentieth-century universalism in context 186
Summary 189
8 Afterword 190
Notes 193
Bibliography 214
Index 249
vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My first thanks goes to the National Academy of Education Postdoctoral
Fellowship Program, and to the Spencer Foundation Small Grants Program,
whose generous support opened my imagination to the issues addressed in this
book. I am also grateful to Boston College for a Faculty Fellowship in the spring
of 2003.
Many people have helped me write this book, either by the example of their
own scholarship, or by expressions of interest in its content, or simply by their
friendship. I thank in particular Donna Lardiere, William Rutherford, Catherine
Snow and Lydia White. In addition, I thank Talbot Taylor, two reviewers for
Routledge, and the membership of the North American Association for the
History of the Language Sciences, a group whose writings have taught me a lot,
but nowhere near enough, about the history of linguistics. The contributions of
my research assistants have also been invaluable: Stephanie Gottwald, Ann
O’Connell, Lauren Mounsey, Kerry Salvo and Elizabeth Silas. Most of all, I am
grateful for the support of my husband, Dayton Haskin, and our three children.
Some portions of Chapter 1 appeared in the article ‘Programmatic ahis-
toricity in second language acquisition theory’, Studies in Second Language
Acquisition, 20, 387–405 (1998). I thank Cambridge University Press for per-
mission to reprint this material. Likewise, I thank John Benjamins Press for
permission to reprint in Chapters 4 and 7 portions of ‘Roger Bacon and Martin
Joos: Generative linguistics’ reading of the past’, from Historiographia Linguistica,
29, 339–378 (2002).
1
INTRODUCTION
This book recounts a history of two sets of ideas. One set of ideas has at its
centre the term ‘universal grammar’, a name enduringly applied in western
linguistic tradition to the notion that human languages necessarily share
important, formative, properties. The other set of ideas has at its centre an
experience, namely the experience of acquisition of a second or foreign
language. In the innumerable generations during which humans have partici-
pated in varieties of this experience, or observed others doing so, many people
have been moved to speculate about its nature. These speculations – sometimes
explicitly worked out as proposals about adult language learning, sometimes
implicit in records of how languages have been learned and taught – form a
second set of ideas, a history of which is recounted in this text. I am in partic-
ular interested in points of intersection between universal grammar and
foreign language learning. From the ancient world up to around the sixteenth
century, the focus is on Europe and the Mediterranean area. Since the 1500s,
work historically rooted in Europe has been carried out in various parts of the
world, so the geographical locus becomes more diffuse from that time up to the
present day.
Some basic definitions
One of the ambitions of this text is to describe the several incarnations of
universal grammar over the course of many centuries. Another is to describe the
western heritage of ideas about second language acquisition. In neither case is
there a continuous thread of development, with the discoveries and the reflec-
tions of one age always building neatly on those of the previous generation. In
particular, the concept of universal grammar has fallen out of intellectual
fashion several times, and on being revived, emerged in different guises. During
some periods competing concepts of universal grammar have existed side-by-
side. Second language learning has likewise been variously construed. But even
granted this diversity, it is possible (and, in fact, necessary) to have from the start
a working sense of what these two terms have referred to.
1