Chomsky's Notion Of A Language Acquisition Device Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 242-3):

All of this is by way of introducing the problem of how thought and language are connected. A clear picture must be drawn of the relation between concept systems and language. Does the mastery of language depend on the existence of a rich and embodied concept system? Or is language mastery more or less autonomous, developing by means of a language acquisition device? 

One of the most pervasive and influential approaches to these critical questions was pioneered by Chomsky. In his formal systems approach, the principal assumption is that the rules of syntax are independent of semantics. Language, in this view, is independent of the rest of cognition. I must take issue with this notion.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, thoughts are the meanings of language projected by the cognitive mental processes of consciousness.

As previously explained, Edelman's 'concept systems' are perceptual meanings organised into systems of relations. In the ontogenesis of linguistic systems, perceptual meanings are identified with concrete experiential linguistic meanings, such that the identity encodes linguistic values by reference to perceptual tokens.

On this view, a biological language acquisition device is, prototypically, a socially-embedded human being.