The Basic Assumptions on Language Acquisition from Perspectives of Cognitive, Generative- Transformational, and Structural Linguistics: An Overview

Abstract

Language acquisition is a varied field, and there is an ocean of approaches from which one can investigate first/second language acquisition. These approaches root in different fields, basically linguistics. As for linguistics, research in language acquisition ranges from structural and generative-transformational to cognitive linguistics. While in contrast with each other in main respects theoretically, and, critically speaking, each having its own pitfalls, they have common methodological applications. This article aims at scrutinizing structural, generative-transformational, and cognitive linguistics in relation with language acquisition and providing support for such a claim that not only they are not totally mutually exclusive and in contrast with each other, but they rather share the same objectives in language acquisition path concerning innate syntactic knowledge, usage-based, and word grammar (WG).