Chomsky’s Fallacies of Merge Mutation(s)with Respect to Abstractness of English

Abstract

It is Chomsky’s great achievement that he instituted rationalism such as linguistic creativity and innateness in linguistics. Based on uniformity and rapidity of language acquisition (or growth), he established species-specific innate Universal Grammar (UG), the faculty of language. However, Chomsky proposed that UG results from mutations. This mutation theory, in relevance to UG consisting of external and internal, or free merge, cannot provide an adequate explanation for language acquisition. Nor is Chomsky’s merge-mutation theory powerful enough to explain abstract structures such as phonological and syntactic structures of English as well as other languages. More importantly, this theory would be repeatedly refuted by many biologists’ claim that mutations hardly add new, complex and specified information. To these fallacies of Chomsky’s merge-mutation theory, an adequate answer is “intelligent design” consisting of irreducible and specified complexity. Intelligent design proposes that human beings are designed with some species-specific biological endowments different from those of other animals, which in turn have their own pre-programmed behaviors. Only human beings are designed with UG as we can see by the numerous cases that Chomsky suggested.