[lbo-talk] munchers

[Miles Jackson]

Michael Smith wrote:
>
> What was novel about Chomsky's project was the attempt to 
> gain a better understanding of whatever it is in our heads 
> that enables us to speak in the first place.
>   

Could you unpack this a little bit?  It doesn't seem to refer to "heads" 
in the physical sense; that would make it a neurocognitive research 
question, not a linguistics question.  It obviously doesn't refer to the 
social structures that must exist for any language to be used and passed 
from generation to generation; although those structures are fundamental 
to the actual existence of language, they exist "outside" our heads. 

So--what is "in our heads" that enables us to speak?

Miles