- Docente: Eric Haeberli
Human language is qualitatively different from communication systems used by other living species, and it is therefore generally considered as one of the main distinctive attributes of humans. But the nature of this attribute has remained controversial. According to one view, language is primarily a cultural artefact, learned on the basis of the same general cognitive abilities that are applied to other learning processes. The alternative view is that language is part of our biological endowment as human beings and that therefore language acquisition is the result of the interaction of an innate language-specific faculty and exposure to linguistic data (the innateness hypothesis). The aim of this seminar is to provide an introduction to this 'nature-nurture' debate by examining different types of linguistic evidence that may bear on this question. The topics we will discuss include: language universals, language change, language acquisition (stages in language acquisition, the 'poverty of the stimulus', age-dependence of acquisition), pidgins and the emergence of Creoles, language in a different modality (sign language).