Language Faculty

Famous quotes containing the words language faculty, language and/or faculty:

“UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this faculty as a ‘language acquisition device,’ an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)

“Like the train’s beat
Swift language flutters the lips
Of the Polish airgirl in the corner seat.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)

“Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)