The Crippled Creativity - A Brief Theoretical Framework

Abstract:     
This paper mainly concentrates on the creative speaking/hearing subject’s body as it is found in Chomsky’s Psycholinguistics in relation to its social environment or social context. It tries to analyze the distinct relationship between Empty Linguistic Organism and human malleability, i.e., the main concern of this paper is how a “physical organ” (Chomsky, 1976: 18) for linguistic creativity or Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is crippled by the outside sociality (behavioral manipulation/threat/violence by the coercive institutions). This effort to correlate LAD and outside sociality would prove the Myth of “ideal speaker-Hearer.” In this way one could switch over to Orwell’s problem or Freud’s problem from Plato’s problem that is mainly concerned with the metanarrative of universal speaking subject. In solution to Orwell’s problem, “...we must discover institutional and other factors that block insight and understanding in crucial areas of our lives and ask why they are effective…” (Chomsky, 1987: xxvii) Now the ontological problem of speaking subjects begins: Problems of learning Theory (LT) for the organism O in the Cognitive domain (D) is LT (O, D) (Chomsky, 1976:18). This Theory can be regarded as function that has certain output (a cognitive structure of some sort). One may specifically reformulate LT (O, D) by considering O as Humans (H) and D as Language (L). Thus one may investigate LT (H, L) as L is strikingly different from non-humans. However, LT shows certain discrepancies as there is no place for outside sociality in LT and its Influence to the biological body of H. Therefore we need to reformulate LT by putting Social Constraints S within this theory. Thus, natural organism H is to be reinterpreted as SH, which is a natural H bound by social constraints. This reformulation, thus, is now represented as LT (SH, L). The output then is not infinite sentences, but finite sentences with repetitions, clichés, stereotypes and phatic communes. This hypothesis (crippling of linguistic creativity) was approved by Noam Chomsky himself (personal correspondence, 1994).

Number of Pages in PDF File: 7

Keywords: Crippled Creativity, Human Malleability and Outside Sociality

Accepted Paper Series