Thread: Noam Chomsky

^ok. Before becoming a poltical pundit Chomsky was best known for his contributions to linguistics - in fact the linguistic world could be said to be divided into two camps, the Chomskyites and everybody else. Chomsky's main contribution to the field is in the area of Universal Grammar. Originally meaning he sum total of linguistic knowledge Chomsky has redefined and refined the concept and made it peculiarly his own. From Wikipedia;

Universal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans. It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages. This theory does not claim that all human languages have the same grammar, or that all humans are "programmed" with a structure that underlies all surface expressions of each and every specific human language. Rather, universal grammar proposes a set of rules that would explain how children acquire their language(s), or how they construct valid sentences of their language.

Universal grammar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Also from Wikipedia: "Noam Chomsky made the argument that the human brain contains a limited set of rules for organizing language. In turn, there is an assumption that all languages have a common structural basis. This set of rules is known as universal grammar. Speakers proficient in a language know what expressions are acceptable in their language and what expressions are unacceptable. The key puzzle is how speakers should come to know the restrictions of their language, since expressions which violate those restrictions are not present in the input, indicated as such. This absence of negative evidence -- that is, absence of evidence that an expression is part of a class of the ungrammatical sentences in one's language -- is the core of poverty of stimulus argument. For example, in English one cannot relate a question word like 'what' to a predicate within a relative clause (1):

(1) *What did John meet a man who sold?
Such expressions are not available to the language learners, because they are, by hypothesis, ungrammatical for speakers of the local language. Speakers of the local language do not utter such expressions and note that they are unacceptable to language learners. Universal grammar offers a solution to the poverty of the stimulus problem by making certain restrictions universal characteristics of human languages. Language learners are consequently never tempted to generalize in an illicit fashion.

The presence of creole languages is cited as further support for this theory. These languages were developed and formed when different societies came together and devised their own system of language. Originally these languages were pidgins and later became more mature languages that developed some sense of rules and native speakers.
The idea of universal grammar is supported by the creole languages by virtue of the fact that such languages all share certain features. Each language, syntactically, uses particles to form future and past tenses and multiple negation to deny or negate. Another similarity is that by changing inflection rather than changing words, a question can be implemented."

So far so good, this is one of the main butresses of Chomsky's work and has, until recently, held good. It has often been attacked by opponents of Chmsky but no convincing proof of its inaccuracy has been offered, the main counter-argument has been that the theory is not falsifiable and therefore is only an observation and cannot offer testable scientifc predictions. This theory, linked with behaviourism, is Chomsky's greatest intellectual contribution, his political writings, while interesting, are ultimately transient while his linguistic theories offer a deep insight into the structure of the human mind.

From Chomsky's Language and Mind Language and Mind. Noam Chomsky (1968)
"More generally, I think that the long-range significance of the study of language lies in the fact that in this study it is possible to give a relatively sharp and clear formulation of some of the central questions of psychology and to bring a mass of evidence to bear on them. What is more, the study of language is, for the moment, unique in the combination it affords of richness of data and susceptibility to sharp formulation of basic issues."

And a summary of Chomsky's main contributions to the field of linguistics;

"Chomsky on Language Acquisition According to Noam Chomsky, the mechanism of language acquisition formulates from innate processes. This theory is evidenced by children who live in the same linguistic community without a plethora of different experiences who arrive at comparable grammars. Chomsky thus proposes that "all children share the same internal contraints which characterize narrowly the grammar they are going to construct." (Chomsky, 1977, p.98) Since we live in a biological world, "there is no reason for supposing the mental world to be an exception." (Chomsky, 1977, p.94) And he believes that there is a critical age for learningn a language as is true for the overall development of the human body.

Chomsky's mechanism of language acquisition also links structural linguistics to empiricist thought: "These principles [of structuralism and empiricism] determine the type of grammars that are available in principles. They are associated with an evaluation procedure which, given possible grammars, selects the best one. The evaluation procedure is also part of the biological given. The acquisition of language thus is a process of selection of the best grammar compatible with the available data. If the principles can be made sufficiently restrictive, there will also be a kind of 'discovery procedure.' " (Chomsky, 1977, p.117)

Chomsky on Generative Grammar
Chomsky's beliefs about generative grammar are the factors which help differentiate his views from the structuralist theory; he believes that generative grammar must "render explicit the implicit knowledge of the speaker." (Chomsky, 1977, p.103) His model of generative grammar begins with an axiom and a set of well-defined rules to generate the desired word sequences.

One goal of Chomsky's work with linguistics is to create an explanatory theory of generative grammar. When we are able to provide a deductive chain of reasoning that does not uphold the general principles of thought, facts termed "boundary conditions" arise and serve as a potential explanation for the phenomena associated with an explanatory theory.

Chomsky on Semantics
"[T]he study of meaning and reference and of the use of language should be excluded from the field of linguistics. . . . [G]iven a lingustic theory, the concepts of grammer are constructed (so it seems) on the basis of primitive notions that are not semantic (where the grammar contains the phonology and syntax), but that the linguistic theory itself must be chosen so as to provide the best possible explanation of semantic phenomena, as well as others." (Chomsky, 1977, p.139)
"It seems that other cognitive systems -- in particular, our system of beliefs concerning things in the world and their behavior -- playan essential part in our judments of meaning and reference, in an extremely intricate manner, and it is not at all clear that much will remain if we try to separate the purely linguistic components of what in informal usage or even in technical discussion we call 'the meaning of lingustic expression.' " (Chomsky, 1977, p.142)
"He showed that surface structure played a much more important role in semantic interpretation that had been supposed; if so, then the Standard hypothesis, according to which it was the deep structure that completely determined this interpretation, is false." (Chomsky, 1977, p.151)
Chomsky on Language Acquisition


Recently Daniel Everet's studies of the Piraha people of the Amazon seem to show that their language does not correspond with the idea of a Universal grammar.

A Reporter at Large: The Interpreter: Reporting & Essays:
From the New Yorker article above

"The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. Everett’s most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts (“the man is walking down the street,” “the man is wearing a top hat”) into a single sentence (“The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street”). Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistic theorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing that recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and is possible because of a uniquely human cognitive ability"

Everet concluded in an article entitled "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Piraha" in Current Anthropology, Volume 46, Number 4, August-October 2005, that Chomsky's framework of universal grammar was wrong. Here is an example of Piraha sung speech http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/dlevere/Audio/song.mov and here's a text of a Piraha story called "Killing the Panther" http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/dlevere/docs/panther.pdf

Why does this matter anyway? It matters because behavioural psychology, the foundations of modern understanding of the human mind, is intimately linked with Chmoskian Universal Grammar. If there is no universal grammar then much of what we assume about human psychology is based on false premises. Fo me that's a good thing in way - Chomsky has overshadowed the fields of behaviourism and linguistics for so long that he now stifles research (although he himself has said of behaviourism "Whatever 'behaviorism' may have served in the past, it has become nothing more than a set of arbitrary restrictions on 'legitimate' theory construction . . . the kind of intellectual shackles that physical scientists would surely not tolerate and that condemns any intellectual pursuit to insignificance." (Bjork, 1993, p.204))"- if you're not Chomskyan you don't get grants or tenure. For all his apparent openness to new ideas in the field of linguistics he is a jealous God. An upheaval in recursion and universal grammar would breathe new life into these subjects.