English Language · English

Read the following excerpt and answer the question that follows: Chomsky gave three lectures under the general title 'What Kind of Creatures are We?' The answer given in the first lecture — 'What is Language?' — is that we are creatures with language, and that language as a uniquely human biological capacity appeared suddenly and quite late in the evolutionary story, perhaps 75,000 years ago. Language, then, does not arise from the social/cultural environment, although the environment provides the stuff or input it works on. That input is 'impoverished'; it can’t account for the creativity of language performance, which has its source not in the empirical world, but in an innate ability that is more powerful than the stimuli it utilizes and plays with. It follows that if you want to understand language, you shouldn’t look to linguistic behavior but to the internal mechanism — the Universal Grammar — of which particular linguistic behaviors are a non-exhaustive expression. Based on the text, why is linguistic behavior insufficient to understand language?