El problema Chomskiano de la adquisición del lenguaje

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to establish the similarities and the differences between two linguistic trends: Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralism and Chomsky's generative grammar. The article highlights the social characteristics of Saussure's theory of language acquisition and the psychological characteristics of Chomsky's theory. Likewise, the article explains why Saussure is not an inductivist, conductivist or associativist, as Chomsky tried to designate him. Among the similarities is the impossibility of reducing the fundamentals of both theories to linguistic neo-positivism, and the possibility of establishing complementary relationships between them. The differences, actually, are quite slight. The relationship between the literal memory of the spoken and his semantic memory is discussed, as well as the function of both memories in the production of a text, allowing the producer to anticipate the global sense of the speech, before having expressed it in language. Consequently, a text study must consider projection and anticipation rules, since these rules not only carry information flow, but anticipate it before being produced.