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How did Noam Chomsky and his coauthors distinguish the narrow and broad language faculties?
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Noam Chomsky
American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, 2010.
In a 2002 article, Noam Chomsky, Marc Hauser, and W. Tecumseh Fitch distinguished between two components of the language faculty to clarify its evolutionary and functional nature:1
- Faculty of Language in the Broad Sense (FLB): This includes the computational system of language along with the perceptual-articulatory systems (used for sound and sign) and the conceptual-intentional systems (used for meaning). These systems represent the interfaces with which the computational system interacts.1
- Faculty of Language in the Narrow Sense (FLN): This consists exclusively of the recursive computational system. Chomsky and his coauthors argued that while other species possess homologues or analogs for the systems found in the FLB, there is no evidence of a comparable computational system in other animals. Consequently, the FLN is considered the unique component that enables unbounded sentential output and distinguishes humans from other creatures.1