Innatism
There are many approaches to the study of language: cultural, social, artistic, historical etc.
There is also an approach which observes language with a view to study the nature of the mind that produces it.
Noam Chomsky's famous example of a grammatically correct sentence which makes no sense was produced to support a new approach to human language acquisition: Innatism.
Innatism maintains that the human brain is born with ideas and knowledge and that certain aspects of our knowledge and understanding are innate. Thanks to this innate language principles the human brain can recognize a sentence to be in correct syntactic order even though the sentence has never been heard before and even though the sentence carries no intrinsic meaning.
Before Chomsky, behaviorists argued that language was a purely learned ability. By developing groundbreaking theories in the field of psycholinguistics Chomsky suggested that people are born with an innate language faculty which enables them to acquire language.
Generative Grammar & Innatism
A signature feature of generative grammar is the view that all people have an innate "language faculty" and that the universal principles of human language reflect intrinsic properties of this language faculty.
In learning their native languages, children acquire specific rules that determine the sound and meaning of utterances in the language. These rules interact with each other in complex ways, and the entire system is learned in a relatively short time and with little or no apparent conscious effort.
The most plausible explanation for the success of human language learners is that they have access to a highly restrictive set of principles which does not require (or permit) them to consider many alternatives in order to account for a particular construction, but instead limits them to a few possible rules from which a choice can be made -- if necessary, without much further evidence.
Since there is no evidence that the principles that define the class of possible rules and systems of rules are learned, it is thought that these principles serve as the preconditions for language learning, forming part of the innate capacity of every normal child.
Viewed in this light, the principles we are attempting to discover are part of the genetic endowment of all humans. It follows that an understanding of these principles is necessary to an understanding of the mental makeup of the human species.
Those who study generative grammar hope to improve our overall understanding of the mental makeup of the human species as a whole.
