Call number
Collections
Publication
New York [etc.]: Praeger, 1986
Description
"Attempts to indentify the fundamental concepts of language, argues that the study of language reveals hidden facts about the mind, and looks at the impact of propaganda."
User reviews
LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
One thing I'll give Dr. Chomsky: combative as he is, he knows how to reach out to the opposition--the linguistic opposition, I mean, not the political opposition, because seriously, fuck those people. He reaches out by presenting generative grammar (I'll say it) 2.0 in a way calculated to disarm
And then Chomsky proceeds to ignore his own dictum, because for him I-language is the only interesting area of enquiry and all the stunning variety of human speech (and writing, which apparently doesn't even register for him) is just so much morphology, in the biological sense--or not even that, because he seems to think that it's not only not worth studying, it can be actively misleading.
And I get that he has his own concerns, and can't help but see them as more fundamental, but he's been hoisted by his own petard a little, hasn't he? Like, he was so eager to make linguistics as such a cognitive science, rather than just suggest that there are aspects of language production that are best tackled with brainograms and such, that he wrested his tradition and the people working in it over right past his own work into psych and neurology. Yeah--it IS a matter of brainograms, and where does that leave Chomsky and his inductive rationalism? Fundamental but superseded.
Meanwhile, the sociolinguists keep on working with their data-gathering methods, and the more cross-pollination the better, I say. Noam Chomsky: brilliant; seminal; limited; archaic?
Show More
and delight the philologers and sociolinguists--as heir to prestructuralist tradition, to Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of language as groeing in the mind like a fruit, not being acquired in a Skinnerian, analogy/repetition sense. Alongside that, he makes the exact point people uncomfortable with the sum effect of his brilliant theory of UG (in whatever form) on modern linguistics need to hear--that generative grammar, the study of universal rules, where language comes from in the mind and the forms it can and cannot take, is not a philosophy--it's a topic. That there is room for the study of internal and external language alongsideeach other.And then Chomsky proceeds to ignore his own dictum, because for him I-language is the only interesting area of enquiry and all the stunning variety of human speech (and writing, which apparently doesn't even register for him) is just so much morphology, in the biological sense--or not even that, because he seems to think that it's not only not worth studying, it can be actively misleading.
And I get that he has his own concerns, and can't help but see them as more fundamental, but he's been hoisted by his own petard a little, hasn't he? Like, he was so eager to make linguistics as such a cognitive science, rather than just suggest that there are aspects of language production that are best tackled with brainograms and such, that he wrested his tradition and the people working in it over right past his own work into psych and neurology. Yeah--it IS a matter of brainograms, and where does that leave Chomsky and his inductive rationalism? Fundamental but superseded.
Meanwhile, the sociolinguists keep on working with their data-gathering methods, and the more cross-pollination the better, I say. Noam Chomsky: brilliant; seminal; limited; archaic?
Show Less
Language
ISBN
0275917614 / 9780275917616
Local notes
XXIX+311 p.