Biolinguistics, the ‘Magnetic’ Mechanism of Language Faculty and Language Acquisition

Abstract

Linguists, language teachers and educators are most of the time confronted with questions as to what knowledge of language is, how it develops in children, how they acquire it, etc. If the assumption that children are innately, genetically and biologically endowed with a language faculty is correct, then, again several other questions are imposed. The latter include questions such as what this language faculty is, what it contains that allows children to acquire any language, in addition to their L1, how this “containment” looks like, and more importantly, how it works. This paper, thus, addresses these issues from biological and physical perspectives, hence, correlating both aspects with language acquisition process. It proposes a novel theory of human language faculty working mechanism, arguing that there is a ‘magnetic mechanism’ underlying the biological architecture that makes it able to “attract” all and only human languages. This mechanism enables both children and adults to acquire any language(s), controlled by distance (i.e. nearness/farness) of such language(s) from the language faculty, and velocity of attraction. The theory has pedagogical implications for language acquisition of L1, L2, L3… Ln, and in both cases, viz. child as well as adult language acquisition.