Language Structure
Both scholars and communicators operate on the premise that language is structured in an orderly fashion. An alternative view is that language isorganized in a random fashion. Clearly, however, communicators treat language as tightly structured. A source of debate centers around whether the structure of language is innate in humans or is learned through socialization processes.
Research History
Noam Chomsky (1957, 1965) suggests that children are born with knowledge of a universal grammar (i.e., a set of principles that are common to all languages) that can be applied to any language. This fundamental knowledge of languages is an individual's linguistic competence. The ability to use a given language in a particular situation is an individual's linguistic performance. Scholars can use linguistic performance as a resource for inferring the character of linguistic competence.
Chomsky observed that while there are a fixed number of phonemes (i.e., meaningfully discriminated smallest units of sound) and morphemes (i.e., meaningfully discriminated blocks of phonemes), humans can construct an infinite number of sentences. This suggests that in learning a language, individuals are learning rules for producing sentences, rather than learning sentences themselves. Actual sentences are referred to as "surface structures." From them, linguists can infer deep structures (i.e., the basic rules of grammar that are part of a speaker's innate knowledge and are the same across languages).
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