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Essay Available:
Pages:
2 pages/≈550 words
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1 Source
Style:
MLA
Subject:
Social Sciences
Type:
Essay
Language:
English (U.S.)
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Topic:

Noam Chomsky's Topic on the Universality and Innate Nature of Language in Human Beings

Essay Instructions:

Answer one of the following questions in a two-paged typed (double-spaced) paper. 12 points. Times new roman. No need to put your name, instructor name and date at the beginning of the paper. Cite your paper when you use outside source. 

1. Our culture is so deeply ingrained in us that many cultural behaviors seem so basic as to be human nature. Yet cross-cultural comparisons show great diversity in some of these behaviors. For example, in our culture we choose marriage partners on the basis of romantic love, which we assume is human nature, when in fact our culture is unusual in that respect. Select one behavior that most members of our society would assume is human nature and show how cross-cultural evidence demonstrates that the behavior is really culturally relative. Other examples might be our gender (male/female) roles, competitiveness, individualism, etc.

 2. Sociologists frequently argue that human behavior cannot be explained in terms of natural instincts. Select an arena of human behavior that is popularly attributed to instinct such as sexuality, aggression, cooperation, competition, or deviance. Construct a sociological rebuttal of the instinct argument.

 

Essay Sample Content Preview:
SOCIOLOGY Introduction
Sociologists have for long argued that human behavior cannot be explained in terms of natural instincts. Their arguments and explanations have been in stark contrast to those of some philosophers such as Noam Chomsky - who began the topic on the universality and innate nature of language in human beings. The distinguished American philosopher and linguist was of the opinion that human infants are born with a species-specific genetic pre-specification for grammar. According to Chomsky, there is a pre-established "language switch" that exists in the fine micro-circuitry of infants at birth, and which switches on after birth in the infants' process of acquiring their mother tongues. In other words, Chomsky's arguments referred to the instinct and innate nature of language as well as competition (Evans, 2014).
Chomsky's research and argument is misleading in several ways. Firstly, subsequent researches to prove his points have considerably failed. No meaningful consensus on the availability of hard-wired knowledge of aspects of grammar in infants has been found despite these researches going on for over 40 years. Secondly, the rationalist linguistics proposes that infants enter the world "pre-developed to acquire language". To the philosophers who strictly adhere to the Chomsky's research, language is an automatic and effortless emergence because of the presence of a Universal Grammar from infancy. This statement is further misleading because it claims that there is universality in all languages; in short, the linguists claim that all ...
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