On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume

Noam Chomsky

Language: English

Pages: 269

ISBN: 1565844750

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Described by the New York Times as “arguably the most important intellectual alive,” Noam Chomsky is known throughout the world for his highly influential writings on language and politics. Featuring two of Chomsky’s most popular and enduring books in one omnibus volume, On Language contains some of the noted linguist and political critic’s most informal and accessible work to date, making it an ideal introduction to his thought.

In Part I, Language and Responsibility (1979), Chomsky presents a fascinating self-portrait of his political, moral, and linguistic thinking through a series of interviews with Mitsou Ronat, the noted French linguist. In Part II, Reflections on Language (1975), Chomsky explores the more general implications of the study of language and offers incisive analyses of the controversies among psychologists, philosophers, and linguists over fundamental questions of language.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

selection. Surely there is no warrant for such an assumption in the case of physical structures. When Searle says that “in general an understanding of syntactical facts requires an understanding of their function in communication since communication is what language is all about,” I agree only in part. If we take communication to include expression of thought, as he does, then the statement becomes at least a half-truth; thus we will have only a partial understanding of syntax if we do not

proceeds to an interesting discussion of other, less simple “cases of meaning,” such as “in hints, insinuations, irony, and metaphor.” But the problem remains that (A) is often false even for the simplest cases. The speaker may mean exactly and literally what he says, but with no intention of the sort that Searle claims must exist. The speaker’s actual intentions may vary widely even in these “simplest cases,” and may shed no light at all on the meaning of what he says. Searle has not entirely

are innate or constructed, to modify the probability of response in terms of contingencies of reinforcement defined in terms of the stimulus space, and so on. Let us call these two quite different approaches R and E, respectively. I mean to suggest, by this terminology, that they reflect leading ideas of rationalism and empiricism. I have discussed the historical question elsewhere, and will return to it below; for the moment, I will only restate my belief that these formulations, as presented, 2

on their interaction with the environment, as in the case of the visual system which we mentioned previously. If that is correct, the mind is a complex system of interacting faculties, which do not develop by means of uniform principles of “general intelligence”; it is constituted of “mental organs” just as specialized and differentiated as those of the body. M.R.: It is for that reason, doubtless, that you insist on the autonomy of grammar, on the fact that grammatical structures do not depend

play any role at all. N.C.: It seems that two questions are confused: one is the question of the autonomy of syntax; the other is whether the study of meaning and reference belongs to the study of language. There isn’t really any problem about that. Everyone has always taken for granted that a central concern of generative grammar is to incorporate linguistic semantics. The “Fodor-Katz” Hypothesis M.R.: Very quickly, among those who have accepted the autonomy of syntax, two tendencies can be

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