Rethinking Michael Tomasello’s social-pragmatic theory of language acquisition

In the last decades, psychologist Michael Tomasello became a leading critic of Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar. Within the framework of his cognitive-functional linguistics, which is associated with emergentism and cognitive linguistics, Tomasello challenges the central pillars of generativism, including the innateness thesis, autonomy of syntax hypothesis, and language module alike. Considering the influence of Tomasello’s ideas, this paper rediscusses the theoretical foundations of his work. The objective in doing so is to reaffirm the validity of generativism’s theoretical assumptions. Notwithstanding this, it is argued that it seems possible, and even necessary, to integrate many aspects of emergentists’ discussions regarding language acquisition and Tomasello’s cognitive-functional linguistics into a research program grounded in a modular conception of language.