Description
Book SynopsisBridging the gap between theoretical linguistics and language teaching, Judith R. Strozer explores what recent theoretical advances suggest about learning a language after childhood and the implications for the design and execution of a foreign language program. Strozer outlines clearly, in nontechnical language, the major concepts of modern language theory, from Chomsky''s theory of language through the most recent discoveries about the abstract foundations of language. She explains ideas about the evolution of a cognitive structure for language in the human brain, a language faculty or Universal Grammar that gives humans alone the creative ability to generate the infinite expressions of language. This innate universal schema for language endows humankind with a number a very broad principles applicable to all languages.
Turning to current advances in the theory of phrase structure, which has replaced our 2,000-year-old rules of grammar with highly abstract universal princi
