A biolinguística e a capacidade humana

Abstract

The biolinguistic perspective brings to the fore approaches that go back to the Aristotelian tradition, with respect to what was later interpreted as mental entities. Accordingly, a person’s language, in all of its aspects”“ sound, meaning and structure ”“ is seen as a state of some component of the mind, which manifests itself through the brain, as an innate attribute, given the biological evolution of human beings. Within this approach, a given language is a state of the faculty of language ”“ “an I-language in technical usage, where “I” underscores the fact the the conception is internalist, individual, and intensional (with na “s”, not a “t’ ”“ that is, the actual formulation of the generative principles, not the set it enumerates; the latter we can think of as a more abstract property of the I-language, rather as we can think of the set of possible trajectories of a comet through the solar system as na abstract property of that system”. The discussion is based on the hypothesis that the faculty of language involves general properties that are found in other biological systems, pointing out three factors that might enter in the development of an individual’s language, namely: genetic factors, which determine the manifestation of the mental state called Universal Grammar, the genetic endowment that is responsible for interpreting the linguistic experience, in language acquisition, giving rise to the languages attained; the experience, which leads to variation, within a fairly narrow range; and principles not specific to   the faculty of language, which include the structural architecture of language, limiting the general character of attainable languages.