Language and Mind

by Noam Chomsky

This is the third edition of Chomsky's outstanding collection of essays on language and mind, first published in 2006. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory. This edition complements them with an additional chapter and a new preface, bringing Chomsky's influential approach into the twenty-first century. Chapters 1-6 present Chomsky's early work on the nature and acquisition of language as a genetically endowed, biological system (Universal Grammar), through the rules and principles of which we acquire an internalized knowledge (I-language). Over the past fifty years, this framework has sparked an explosion of inquiry into a wide range of languages, and has yielded some major theoretical questions. The final chapter revisits the key issues, reviewing the 'biolinguistic' approach that has guided Chomsky's work from its origins to the present day, and raising some novel and exciting challenges for the study of language and mind.

Genres: Linguistics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Language, Psychology, Science, Essays

206 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions and the media.
Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants (his father was William Chomsky) in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B.F. Skinner.
An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard M. Nixon's list of political opponents. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Chomsky's commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. An anti-Zionist, Chomsky considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid, and criticizes U.S. support for Israel.
Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. Chomsky remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, U.S. involvement and Israel's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mass media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Since 2017, he has been Agnese Helms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.

Reviews

[Roy Lotz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Noam Chomsky is one of those towering names one hears echoed in drunken college conversations about intellectual whatnot. Dropping a reference to his political activism or his linguistic theories is mandatory to covering all of your intellectual bases. I’m certainly guilty of engaging in not a few semi-inebriated conversations about Chomskyan linguistics without having had the slightest understand of it. Now, at least I can say I have the basic idea. So, as an act of good will, I have written a short summary, which might be of use to you in your next heady conversation over a bottle of wine.

But before I get into the meat of his theories, a note on the style and format of this book. Chomsky is an able writer; he is direct, clear, and doesn’t use any unnecessary jargon. He embodies the best qualities of academic writing, in that he is always careful to qualify his arguments, to thoroughly explain his points, and to acknowledge and refute his opponents.

As he says in the introduction, there is quite a bit of overlap in content between the six pieces in this book (three lectures and three essays). This redundancy would normally be annoying; but I found myself being thankful for it, as understanding Chomsky’s ideas without a linguistic background was no easy task. In any case, because this book (or at least most of it) wasn’t intended for specialists, it can—with a little bit of effort—be understood by a layman. This, combined with its short length, makes it a nice primer to his work.

Chomsky begins by situating himself in a particular historical tradition—rationalism. One might, with justice, call Chomsky a Platonist, a Cartesian, a Leinbizian, or a Kantian. This is to contrast Chomsky with empiricists like Locke and Hume. At the time when Chomsky began his linguistic work, the dominant paradigm in psychology was behaviorism. Behaviorism attempts to account for animal behavior by proposing a system of associated stimuli and responses. Pavlov’s drooling dogs is the most frequently cited example of this line of thinking.

At first, behaviorism seemed very promising. It was elegantly simple, and it looked like any animal could be conditioned to do anything with enough training. Behaviorism had the advantage of bringing together a variety of different phenomena all under the same explanatory umbrella, and of being amenable to experimental verification. In 1957, B.F. Skinner came out with his controversial Verbal Behavior, which attempted to explain language within this paradigm. Chomsky, in turn, wrote an enormously influential review of Skinner’s book, in which he criticized the argument, and, by implication, cast doubt on the whole behaviorist project.

So what is Chomsky’s argument? And why does he call his thinking rationalist, and Skinner’s empiricist?

Simply put, rationalist accounts of knowledge argue that certain ideas cannot be derived from sense perception or from experience, and so must be derived from reason, which is an innate faculty. Empiricism, by contrast, argues that there are not innate ideas or principles, and that sensory perception and experience are enough to account for all knowledge.

From this short definition, one can see the connection between behaviorism—which explains knowledge as a set of ingrained habits related to regularly occurring stimuli—and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he says:

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience: in that, all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself.

Chomsky has some major problems with this line of thinking. Put simply: how can a human child acquire mastery of the enormously complex symbolic medium we call language, with such little exposure to it? If all knowledge is derived from experience, then this shouldn’t be possible. Therefore, Chomsky argues, the ability to learn language must be innate.

At first, this argument seems a little silly. Nobody thinks that the ability to program computers or play chess is innate; we clearly aren’t born being able to do so; nor are we born with the ability to speak. Furthermore, a child learns whatever language is spoken around them; a Japanese child in France will learn French. Children gradually accumulate words and put them together into simple sentences, just like aspiring guitarists learn chords, melodies, and riffs. Why posit an innate faculty for language when we don’t posit one for guitar playing?

Well, language is quite a special activity. For one, every normal adult is able to speak a language fluently. Some people are naturally able computer programmers; others are naturally able chess players; but linguistic competence is universal among psychologically healthy humans. Furthermore, language is special in that it makes infinite means of finite resources. There is no limit to the number of sentences that can be spoken in any given language, even though there is a finite number of words and grammatical tenses. Language is also intrinsically creative; we do not—like Pavlov’s dogs—simply say a particular sentence when we hear a bell, but come up with a sentence to suit the particular situation.

Explaining language as simply a set of ingrained habits clearly can’t work, since habits don’t have any of these qualities (creativity, infinite potential for variation, universality). So considering that the potential linguistic output of a given person far exceeds the linguistic ‘input’ (all the utterances that the given person has ever heard) it is logical to posit some innate mechanism that facilitates the learning of language. Now the question is, what is the nature of this mechanism?

This is where this review gets necessarily vague, as Chomsky’s explanation is fairly technical, and beyond my ken. But I’ll do my best.

Chomsky starts off with his famous notion of universal grammar. Now, it important to point out that Chomsky isn’t arguing that English, Chinese, Norwegian, and Swahili can be boiled down to the same grammar. Rather, universal grammar is a set of conditions a potential grammar must meet in order to qualify as a human language. Several particular grammars may meet these conditions.

These conditions play a crucial role in language acquisition. As Chomsky explains, these rules greatly reduce the number of admissible grammatical hypotheses that a learner must posit (unconsciously, of course) to account for the linguistic data they are exposed to. Put more concretely, when a young girl is hearing her mother speak English, she does not have to go through every logical possibility that might account for the data; in other words, she doesn't need to exhaust every potential hypothesis. Instead, she must simply chose from the various grammars that are permitted by the conditions imposed by universal grammar.

Chomsky points out that universal grammar must be fairly restrictive, as the linguistic data presented to a child is usually “degenerate” (to use his word). Everyday speech is fragmentary, jagged, full of starts and stops, vague, and sometimes even ungrammatical. Yet, from this scanty and inconsistent information, the child assembles the marvelously complex system of communication we know as English. Mere induction is far too weak to make the jump from the data to the grammar; there isn’t enough time or information to account for every logical possibility. Remarkably, miraculously, we all come to the same conclusion—English grammar, in this case—from different information—whatever sentences happen to be spoken around us as infants.

Now, you may ask, is language really that tricky? Why do we need these innate principles? Isn’t is just subject, verb, object? Nouns, verbs, and adjectives? That doesn’t sound insuperable.

To this, Chomsky responds that our everyday notions of grammar cannot account for some basic qualities of language which normally go unnoticed. Consider these two sentences: (A) “I expected the doctor to examine John”; and (B) “I persuaded the doctor to examine John." Now, at first sight, these two sentences seem grammatically identical; the only difference is the difference of verbs. However, Chomsky points out that this surface-level similarity obscures a crucial difference on the deep level. This is apparent when we transform both A and B to make: (A1) “I expected John to be examined by the doctor”; and (B1) “I persuaded John to be examined by the doctor.”

Now, notice that the meaning of A and A1 are identical; but when this same transformation is applied to B—supposedly grammatically identical to A—the meaning changes. Instead of the doctor being persuaded, it’s John. This is a subtle point that took me several attempts to understand, but the implication is this: Since every language-speaker instinctively knows that there are different operations necessary to turn A and B from the active to the passive voice, they must understand the grammatical relationship of both sentences on a deeper level than merely their surface form. If they only understood the surface-level grammar, they would make the mistake of turning B into B1, which changes the meaning of the sentence.

This leads Chomsky to divide grammar into surface and deep levels. The deep structure must express the exact relationships between the meaning of the words; then, some transformational rules must apply to convert this deep-level meaning into the surface-level grammar of everyday speech. These transformational rules can derive different surface level manifestations of the same deep-level forms—such as A and A1. (Note that the deep structure is an entirely different concept from universal grammar. The deep-level grammar is a logical relationship between ideas, while universal grammar is a set of properties that any grammar must have in order to be an allowable grammar.)

Because Chomsky believes that this deep structure must exist in order to account for some basic properties of grammar (such as the above example), learning a language is not so simple as we might be led to believe. Acquiring competency is not as simple as dividing words into verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc., but requires a grasp of these more abstract and intricate deep-level structures. These deep-level structures are, in turn, obscured by the transformational rules that convert them into surface-level grammar (as in the case of the apparently identical forms of A and B), which would make the task of apprehending the deep-level structures via induction and experience alone an impractical feat.

I’m quickly getting to the end of my understanding of Chomsky’s ideas. I am certainly not in any sense qualified to pass judgment on the success or failure of his theories. I would like to say, however, that it seems fairly obvious to me that there must be certain innate qualities of the brain that enable individuals to learn language; the universality of language-competency, and ease of acquisition from limited data, makes this conclusion inescapable for me. The only question is: what specific properties must we attribute to the mechanism that enables this learning? Is it Chomsky’s hypothesis, or some other innate property?

I also am sympathetic to Chomsky’s rationalism. It seems to me that the best critique of the empiricist account of learning came from the empiricist tradition itself, in the form of David Hume’s critiques of causality and induction. As Hume pointed out, even those two basic notions—without which nothing in daily life makes sense—cannot be derived from logic alone, nor from experience alone; the only explanation, as Kant later pointed out, is that the principles of causality and induction are innate (though Kant wouldn’t phrase it like that).

But if we’re willing to allow that the idea of causality and induction are innate, why stop there? It seems that there isn’t any good reason not to continue positing innate principles that would allow humans to make sense of experience. Such an explanation would be compatible within a Darwinian framework, and would also be compatible with what we know about the specialized regions of the brain.

But I will cease to speculate on matters of which I know nothing. (Well, until I write another long-winded book review.) For now, I only hope that this little summary may help you in your next drunken intellectual conversation.

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a set of 3 lectures. It is complex and specific. First, it is a question of studying the nature of language; then, the author presents contemporary research on linguistics and thought. And finally, the theory of the direction that linguistics could take.
Certain words remained obscure to me from the beginning to the end of the book, such as: "deep structure," and "surface structure".

[John Hatley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting essay on a topic that has fascinated me since my university years. Unfortunately the science of linguistics — like every other science — has made so much progress in the 28 years or so since it was first written that it can almost be viewed as a history book.

[Ana · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am not assessing the book's quality, as much as I am rating my enjoyment in reading it - it felt more like a chore. Maybe I've been reading too much watered-down pop science to be able to handle this book, and I think I approached it with some flawed expectations.
For one, I didn’t know going in and from the title that it would be a collection of essays, so I was let down by a certain lack of structure or cohesive global arch. I think I would have benefited from the chapters/essays being a little better broken down into sub chapters and sections. I often found myself having missed a jump from one idea to the next with no obvious marker.
The overall style and tone are definitely those of a research paper, but for a book about language written by a linguist, I thought that it used remarkably dry language and unnecessarily complicated sentences that didn’t facilitate my understanding of some points.
For extended portions, it consisted of responses to articles criticizing his previous papers, none of which I was familiar with. This felt pretty much like eating dinner quietly while the adults at the table are having an argument
I am really interested in the subject, but my only prior reading, which had referenced Chomsky quite a couple of times, wasn’t a solid enough starting base. However, I do really appreciate the value of his work and I felt like I took away some important points in the fascinating field of linguistics and grammar.
Overall, I would recommend “Language and the Mind” to people very passionate in the field, well accustomed to reading research papers. For newbie enthusiasts like me, I would suggest starting with “The Language Instinct” though. I’d love to gradually learn more about the field myself and maybe giving his works another try later on.

[Nadi Ghaffari · Rating 1 out of 5]

پولشو دادم.نمرشم نگرفتم.چون نمیفهمیدم تکلیفشم ننوشتم...
دلم میخواد پاره کنمش و آتیشش بزنم...
#عصبانی

[Leonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the Anshen lecture, Noam Chomsky’s lays out his basic thoughts and concept on linguistics. For him, language isn’t communal. For example, a lay person’s conception of water is different from that of a chemist. Language is an agent’s perspective on the things of the world, rather than a reference to them. A many-to-one mapping of representations or symbols to an object. As such, he believes that we should focus on syntax rather then semantics to understand the nature of language. “In the study of language, there is new understanding of the computational systems of the mind/brain, including those commonly called ‘phonetic’ or ‘semantic,’ though in fact, all are ‘syntactic’ in the broader sense that they have to do with mental representations.”


"Chomsky" by Duncan Rawlinson - http://flickr.com/photos/thelastminut.... Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...

In the language faculty, “the cognitive system stores information that is accessed by the performance systems, which use for articulation, interpretation, expression of thought, asking questions, referring, and so on.” For Chomsky, the linguist should identify the principles of languages underlying grammatical constructs, principles that may be reduced to more general ones. And we can learn from those principles and construct systems based on them.

This lecture introduces Chomsky’s thoughts and concepts and I recommend it to anyone who wants to dig into linguistics.

[Marzie taram]

یک قفسه باید درست کنم به نام "مشکل ها" کتاب هایی که باید بعد از خواندن کتاب های مرتبط دوباره خوانده شوند بلکه فهمیده شوند!

[Armineh Nouri · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read the very first edition of this book (p. 1968) and must therefore admit to my ignorance of all new/modified content in more recent editions—from what I've understood in other reviews, the newest edition includes more than six chapters, with the original three incorporated into a single, opening chapter.

As you would expect from a work of linguistics coming from Chomsky, this book is immensely insightful and engaging. Nevertheless, there are a few points that would do the publication good if they were further clarified (the underlined phrases are parts that merit further clarification; all citations refer to the '68 edition):

- [While investigating abstract rules of phonological transformation]: "A single example can hardly carry much conviction. A careful investigation of sound structure, however, shows that there are a number of examples of this sort, and that, in general, highly abstract underlying structures are related to phonetic representation by a long sequence of rules, just as on the syntactic level abstract deep structures are in general related to surface structures by a long sequence of grammatical transformations." (p. 36)

- [When refuting Thorpe's characterization of human and animal languages as "propositional"]: "Rate of alternation of high and low pitch [songs] is a linguistic dimension correlated with the nonlinguistic dimension of intention to defend a territory. The bid signals its intention to defend a territory by selecting a correlated point along the linguistic dimension of pitch alternation[...] The linguistic dimension is abstract, but the principle is clear. A communication system of the second type has an indefinitely large range of potential signals, as does human language. The mechanism and principle, however, are entirely different from those employed by human language to express indefinitely many new thoughts, intentions, feelings, and so on." (p. 61)

- [When discussing Peirce's theory of abduction]: "Speaking about the future, I think it is not unlikely that the dogmatic character of the general empiricist framework and its inadequacy to human and animal intelligence will gradually become more evident as specific realizations, such as taxonomic linguistics, behaviorist theory, and the perceptron models, heuristic methods, and 'general problem solvers' of the early enthusiasts of 'artificial intelligence,' are successively rejected on empirical grounds when they are made precise and on grounds of vacuity when they are left vague." (p. 79)

- I suppose the book could also benefit from a more clear definition of how the author envisions the interplay and intricate balance between generative and restrictive rules of transformation (not to be confused with generative and discriminative models in statistics), as discussed throughout chapters 2 and 3.

The above issues might have been further explored and clarified in newer editions of the book, and if so, I'm eager to follow up on Mr. Chomsky's theses and speculations as they have evolved throughout recent decades.

[Mohsen Abootalebi · Rating 2 out of 5]

بنظرم اسم درستی برای کتاب انتخاب نشده،بهتر میبود میگفت سخنرانی ای از چامسکی نه زبان و اندیشه
بد نبود،ولی چیز مرتبط با زبان و اندیشه که پاسخ بده به پرسشها من نیافتم

[J C]

I initially picked this up to supplement the linguistics-themed music theory lectures I'm watching by late NYC philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein (a fantastic conductor of immense energy and subtlety of mind) because even though I didn't buy the phonetic analogies (the harmonic series has aesthetic qualities I don't believe phonemes in speech have, despite what people might make of the almost universal use of 'ma' to signify mother) he really convinced me about syntax. I will never see music the same way again: as the recursive transformation of a set of symmetric musical phrases, whose aesthetic (read: poetic) qualities lie not merely in truncations of unnecessary syntactic (grammatical) elements but also semantic ones: leading to metaphor and poetry. Taken in a musical sense, music is when enough structure (i.e. symmetry, grammar) is given to set the mind dancing with the patterns of sounds (which we can discern through their relation in a harmonic series) yet sets the mind to discover analogies and metaphors which best capture the subtle differences in moving from phrase to phrase.

The more I think about it, music is really an abstraction of the rhetorical content of language. And it is rhetoric which makes language so lightning fast.

(Rhetoric is just abstracting reasoning from one situation to another, in such a way as to be crystal clear in its demonstrative, analogy-making powers, and imo is embedded in language. Since we are defining terms, reasoning is simulating, using 'pictures' and 'models', on one's own or another's behalf, an expected change of perception, belief, and intention.

So the rhetorical question 'why not?' is a way of abstracting reasoning from other situations where when probed, no convincing reason could be provided not to do something in a certain way, without actually needing the speaker to have thought through the situation at hand fully, placing the burden of proof on his interlocutor. Usually this statement is made when one intuits through body language, tone, and language that the person issuing the command or proposition is being reckless or baseless).

Music, like math, by its interactions with the human mind creates its own content. But unlike math, it does not appeal to 'pictures' made rigorous by definitions, limiting and forcing 'pictures' into the correct mold.

Math is models which reference other models.
Language (as originally and most frequently used) is models which references a socio-experiential world, with a way of describing this world, loosely-fitting labels onto experiences and in so doing discretising it, and then reconjuring up a complex world by combining now-discrete objects using some sort of innate, object-oriented, relational 'grammar'.
Music doesn't have models, it is purely the dynamic part of the relational grammar. In this way it is like abstract art. There are no objects: only distinctions (discretisations) and their relations. The distinctions do not only have to be between notes in a harmonic series. They can also be of timbre and amplitude, and the various sound envelopes (volume - attack, decay, sustain, release, pitch etc.), the last of which allows having different 'voices' and imbuing the more simple relationships of pitch and volume with more subtle qualities.
Music is relations which reference other relations.
(it is like an abstract formulation of set theory, with no such things as objects, only sets)

Each of these 'expressions' of the human mind, shaped by the need to 'get it right', whether in gaining deeper understanding through raw intellect and technical precision, or evoking (and transforming into communicative experience) memories imbued in socio-cognitive-experiental context, or a way to set alight and focus the mind. They all, in their way, help to shape some aspect of the human mind.

An interesting question would be what innate faculties does music and language both make use of...? One of the most of the most basic would be aural recall... which seems something the brain is particularly adept at doing: capturing the intonation, stress, and timbre (voice) of speech...

Update: Just a conjecture... music moves us because language moves us! The rhetorical content of language is ultimately one of conviction and deep emotion. All of our strong emotions, the movements in our bowels, can be magnified in music, without us being hardly aware of their source.

By this view, music is more likely a byproduct of the development of language in humans, rather than a faculty that co-evolved with language or preceded it. In other words: language emerged, but music was probably 'discovered'.

Update #2: Apparently newborns tend to prefer music to language. This could either be evidence against my case, or I could explain it away: well, it's not like there's anything to describe when you're inside the womb... but the mind is always ready to gobble up patterns... of course your baby brain likes music more!

All of this pattern-making makes language an excellent disciplinarian of thought...

It's like listening to oneself go 'hmm, if Audrey is eating (then (infer cause)) she must be hungry, but (if (removal of conditional: factual)) she is being eaten (then (infer consequence)) and(she) must be frightened.

Without bracketed words
If Audrey is eating she must be hungry, but she is being eaten and must be frightened.

e(A) implies (inferrentially) f(H)

however

e^-1(A) implies (causally) f(F)

e eating
A Audrey
f feels
H hungry
F frightened

There are obvious parallels between both phrases both in their syntactic structure (inference/implication) and their semantic meaning (how Audrey feels given some situation where eating is concerned) yet there are enough differences such that the sentence is of interest.

Though it doesn't really come through in this example, the change of the subject (Audrey) to the object is sort of ironic as we perceive in her change in attitude towards the affair of eating when she is the one being eaten.

Consider the earlier sentence made more explicit:
Audrey eats because she is hungry, but if she were the one being eaten, she would be frightened.

We can convert this to a more sparse and musical-looking notation:

∆∆ ~ ° ~ | ∆\~/∆
∆ ^ ∆ = = | (= ∆ =)

and pretending it were really notation, and choosing the right notes in a scale, come up with something that has enough perceivable structure to elevate itself above mere noise.

[Jón Einarsson]

Hæfilega tyrfið fyrir einhvern sem hefur enga fyrirframþekkingu á málvísindum. Fínn inngangur að Chomsky býst ég við.

[Lusha Petrunina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't really learn anything I didn't already know (granted I read half of this book for class last semester).
I know he says this in the preface, but there is SO MUCH repetition. Like the first 20 pages of the last chapter are literally copy pasted from previous chapters.
Also it feels like half the time he is just saying how everyone else is wrong and he is right.

At least now I can say I read something by Chomsky tho.

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

Outdated, unscientific, and frequently just plain wrong. A fantastic base for hypotheses that have since been empirically tested and found false.

[خرس · Rating 2 out of 5]

اين كتاب مشتمل بر 6 مقاله است. دستاوردهاي زبانشناختي در مطالعه ذهن: گذشته، دستاوردهاي زبان‌شناختي در مطالعه ذهن: حال،‌ دستاوردهاي زبانشناختي در مطالعه ذهن: آينده، صورت و معني در زبان‌هاي طبيعي، ماهيت صوري زبان و در نهايت زبانشناسي و فلسفه.

دكتر كوروش صفوي در مقدمه خود آورده است: اين اثر همانند تمامي آثار كلاسيك رشته‌هاي مختلف ويژگي‌هاي خود را داراست. با گذشت زمان، ‌مخاطبان اين دسته از متون را متخصصاني تشكيل مي‌دهند كه با اهدافي ويژه به مطالعه آثاري مي‌پردازند كه شايد اعتبار علمي زمان خود را از دست داده باشند و صرفا حلقه‌اي از زنجيره تلاش انسان را درراه انديشه و شناخت نادانسته‌ها تشكيل دهند.

چامسكي نيز در پيش‌گفتار كتاب آورده است: شش فصل حاضر را مي‌توان به دو گروه تقسيم كرد. سه مقاله نخست اين مجموعه در سال 1968 با نام «زبان و ذهن» به چاپ رسيدند. اين سه مقاله مرتبط با دستاوردهاي زباني در مطالعه ذهن (گذشته، حال و آينده ) بر مبناي سخنراني‌هايي تدوين شده‌اند كه با نام بكمان در برابر جمع كثيري از مخاطبان دانشگاهي در دانشگاه كاليفرنيا، در ژانويه 1967 قرائت شد. اين سه مقاله، ‌مجموعه‌اي را تشكيل مي‌دهند كه با سه مقاله بعد تفاوت دارد.

اين اثر، ترجمه كتاب LANGUAGE AND MIND است كه براي نخستين‌بار در سال 1378 از سوي انتشارات هرمس به چاپ رسيده است.

انتشارات هرمس،‌ «زبان و ذهن» را در قطع رقعي،‌ 272 صفحه و شمارگان 1500 نسخه به‌بهاي 35000 ريال شهريور ماه87 در اختيار علاقمندان قرار داده است.


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سخنرانی دوم به تحولات سالهای اخیر زبان‏شناسی در زمینه مطالعه ذهن اختصاص یافته و سرانجام سومین مقاله، بحثی است صرفا مبتنی بر حدس درباره روش‏های آتی مطالعه ذهن و زبان.چامسکی در این سه مقاله تلاش دارد تا اثبات کند که زبان‏شناسی شاخه‏ای از روان‏شناسی به ویژه روان‏شناسی شناخت است.نویسنده در پایان یان سه مقاله و در پی کنکاشی ژرف و جدی و در عین حال عجیب زیرا پس از دوران فردینان دو سوسور و یا لئونارد بلومفیلد که بر استقلال زبان‏شناسی تاکید داشتند این دیدگاه چامسکی نمی‏تواند امتیازی برای دانش زبان‏شناسی بحساب آید و حیثیت آنرا حفظ نماید-نتیجه‏گیری می‏کند که:

مسلما برای مسائل دیرینه‏ی زبان و ذهن، به کمک مطالعاتی که امروزه فعالانه صورت می‏گیرد، راه حلی قطعی یا حتی اشاره‏ای به پاسخی نهایی متصور نیست. مع هذا، این مسائل را می‏توان به شیوه‏های جدیدی تدوین کرد و در پرتو تازه‏ای نگریست.به نظر من چنین می‏نماید که برای نخستین بار پس از سال‏ها، موقعیتی جدی برای پیشرفت اساسی در مطالعه‏ی دستاوردهای ذهن در زمینه‏ی ادارک و مبانی ذاتی فراگیری دانش فراهم آمده است.ما هنوز در بسیاری از جنبه‏ها، حتی به نخستین رهیافت نیل به پاسخی واقعی برای مسائل دیرینه‏ی این زمینه دست نیافته‏ایم.در این مورد می‏توان مسائل عمده‏ی مرتبط با جنبه‏ی خلاق کاربرد زبان را نمونه آورد که همچون گذشته لاینحل باقی مانده‏اند.مطالعه در زمینه‏ی معنی‏شناسی جهانی نیز، با تمامی اهمیتی که مسلما در بررسی دقیق ساخت زبان بر عهده دارد، از قرون وسطی تا کنون کمتر پیشرفتی داشته است.حوزه‏های مهم دیگری را نیز می‏توان نمونه آورد که پیشرفت در آن‏ها به آهستگی صورت پذیرفته و یا اصلا تحقق نیافته است.تا کنون پیشرفت واقعی تنها در حوزه‏ی مطالعه‏ی اصول صوری‏ای که تحقّق جنبه‏ی خلاق کاربرد زبان را ممکن می‏سازد و صورت آوایی و محتوای معنایی پاره گفتارها را تعیین می‏کند.درک ما از این ساخت و کارها، اگر چه ناقص و پراکنده است، ولی به اعتقاد من از مضامینی واقعی برای مطالعه‏ی روان‏شناسی انسان برخوردار است.با دنبال کردن انواع مطالعاتی که امروز امکان‏پذیر می‏نماید و با توجه دقیق به مسائلی که در حال حاضر قابل بررسی‏اند، این امکان می‏تواند فراهم آمده باشد که حتی در برخی از جزئیات به توضیح محاسبات انتزاعی و دقیق بپردازیم که تا اندازه‏ای ماهیت ادراکات و ویژگی دانش قابل فراگیری ما را تعیین می‏کند-روش‏های کاملا ویژه‏ای از پدیده‏های تعبیری که، در حدی وسیع، فراتر از خود آگاهی و تسلط ما قرار دارند و شاید منحصر به نوع انسان باشند.

مقاله چهارم این کتاب با عنوان«صورت و معنی در زبان‏های طبیعی»به زعم چامسکی متن سخنرانی غیر تخصصی‏ای است که او در ژانویه 1969 در کالج گوستاولس آدولفوس مینوتا برای شاگردان دبیرستانی، دانشجویان کالج و آموزگاران ایراد کرده است.در واقع در این مقاله برخی از مفاهیم بنیادین مطرح شده در سه مقاله پیشین مرور شده و در ضمن به بعضی از مطالعات جدیدتر در زمینه تعبیر معنایی ساخت‏های نحوی اشاره رفته است:

«رهیافت من به مطالعه زبان در این بحث به شاخه‏ای از روان‏شناسی نظری انسان راه می‏برد.هدف این رهیافت نشان دادن و توضیح استعدادهای ذهنی است که یادگیری و کاربرد زبان برای انسان میسر می‏سازد. تا آن جا که ما می‏دانیم، این استعدادها ویژه‏ی نوع انسان است و نظیر آن در میان سایر موجودات زنده دیده نمی‏شود.اگر نتایج این پژوهش بتواند صحیح باشد، آن گاه باید پذیرفت که انسان باید به طور ذاتی از مجموعه‏ای بسیار غنی و بارز از خصایص ذهنی‏ای برخوردار باشد که شکل معینی از زبان را بر اساس داده‏هایی قلیل و نسبتا نازل تعیین می‏کند.علاوه بر این، انسان زبانی را که دارای نمود ذهنی است به گونه‏ای خلاق به کار می‏برد.این کار او، از یک سو محدود به مجموعه‏ای از قواعد است و از سوی دیگر، برای بیان‏افکار جدید درباره تجربه‏های گذشته یا ابراز احساسات کنونی، به گونه‏ای غیر متعارف و انتزاعی، آزادانه عمل می‏کند.اگر این ادعا درست باشد، آن گاه دیگر نمی‏توان به بررسی«کنترل»رفتار انسان بر حسب شرایط محرک، زمان‏بندی‏های تقویت، پیدا شدن ساخت‏های عادتی، الگوهای رفتاری و جز آن امید بست.البته می‏توان با ابداع محیطی محدود این گونه کنترل‏ها و الگوها را نشان داد، ولی دلیلی نمی‏توان یافت که ثابت کند به کمک چنین روش‏هایی می‏توان درباره‏ی استعدادهای بالقوه‏ی انسان به چیزی دست یافت، مگر همان نتایجی که از مشاهده‏ی رفتار انسان در زندان، ارتش یا در بسیاری از کلاس‏ها حاصل می‏شود.ویژگی‏های بنیادین ذهن انسان را نمی‏توان با پژوهش‏هایی از این دست شناخت و اگر اجازه داشته باشم که در پایان صحبت‏هایم نظری «غیر متخصصانه»بدهم، باید بگویم که من شخصا از این بابت بسیار خوشحالم.»

اما مقاله پنجم، مقاله‏ای تخصصی‏تر و فنی‏تر است.این مقاله در درجه اول برای روان‏شناسان و روان‏شناسان زبان نگاشته شده و به نظر نویسنده، در واقع ضمیمه‏ای است بر اثر«اریک لنبرگ»بنام«مبانی زیستی زبان»، در این مقاله چامسکی تلاش کرده است. تا طرحی فشرده و نظام‏مند از نظریه دستور گشتاری- زایشی ارائه کند و جایگاه آن را در روان‏شناسی انسان تشریح و توجیه نماید.

در مقاله ششم که در کتاب تحت عنوان «زبان‏شناسی و فلسفه»آمده و مترجم کتاب از آن به عنوان شاهکار این مجموعه یاد کرده است.چامسکی علایق مشترک بین رشته‏های زبان‏شناسی و فلسفه به ویژه معرفت‏شناسی را برمی‏شمارد و نقطه تلاقی این دو رشته را نشان می‏دهد.این سخنرانی که در آوریل 1968 در دانشگاه نیویورک و در حضور فیلسوفان حرفه‏ای قرائت شده، آخرین مطالعات در زمینه زبان‏شناسی را مورد بررسی قرار می‏دهد و نگرش‏های ارزنده‏ای را درباره ماهیت دانش بشری، مبانی فراگیری آن و نیز روش‏های فراگیری ارائه می‏نماید.چامسکی پس از بحثی دشوار که از خواننده، دقت نظر فراوان و پایداری در درک مطلب را طلب می‏کند، نتیجه می‏گیرد که:

«به طور خلاصه، من نسبت به این موضوع تردید دارم که زبان‏شناسی، دست کم در شرائط کنونی‏اش، بتواند«فن جدیدی»برای فلسفه تحلیلی به دست دهد که در خور توجه باشد.با این حال، به نظر من چنین می‏رسد که مطالعه زبان می‏تواند نتایجی را درباره‏ی دانش بشر روشن سازد و تا حدی نیز به اثبات برساند که مستقیما به مباحث کلاسیک فلسفه‏ی ذهن مربوطاند. به زعم من، در این حوزه است که می‏توان در سال‏های آتی منتظر همکاری واقعا ثمر بخش زبان‏شناسی و فلسفه بود.

***

کتاب«زبان و ذهن»خواننده‏ای را طلب می‏کند که با اصول علم زبان‏شناسی، تا میزان قابل توجهی آشنا باشد و در ضمن مفهوم«شکیبائی و پایداری و دقت نظر»در درک مسائل دشوار علمی را بواقع درک کرده و پذیرفته باشد.آرای مطرح شده در کتاب«زبان و ذهن»با آرای امروز چامسکی تفاوت بارز دارد-گرچه در بعضی جاها، از توضیحات چامسکی تفاوت بارز دارد-گرچه در کتاب آگاه می‏شویم-اما همین مسئله ضمن آنکه بیانگر پویائی او در بازبینی آرای گذشته‏اش می‏باشد، در عین حال حلقه‏ای است از زنجیره تلاش انسان در راه اندیشه و شناخت نادانسته‏ها.

«زبان و ذهن»اثر نوام چامسکی با برگردان دکتر کورش صفوی و ویراستاری جناب آقای علی صلح‏جو اثری است کلاسیک در زمینه زبان‏شناسی که وجود آن در کتابخانه هر علاقمند و پژوهنده جدید«زبان» ضروری است.

[Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

... if we contemplate the classical problem of psychology, that of accounting for human knowledge, we cannot avoid being struck by the enormous disparity between knowledge and experience - in the case of language, between the generative grammar that expresses the linguistic competence of the native speaker and the meagre and degenerate data on the basis of which he has constructed this grammar for himself.

It is this problem that motivates Chomsky's work in linguistics. When he began his linguistics work in the 50s, the main focus of psychological research was based on behaviorism: the notion that learning is based on stimulus/response patterns and on inductive processes that generalize from specific observations to more fully-formed concepts. The idea that such simple processes could account for the rapid acquisition of language competence ought to have have been seen as absurd, but it is an idea that lingers to this day in somewhat revised form. Some of Chomsky's early polemics against behaviorism, and B. F. Skinner in particular, can be found online, for example
Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior and The Case Against B.F. Skinner.

Chomsky objected to behaviorism on two grounds. The first objection was, as just noted, the utter implausibility of extending stimulus/response models to the essentially unbounded and creative use of language. His second objection is that behaviorism makes the a priori choice to limit itself to descriptions of behavior, and explicitly rejects a program of explaining behavior. In particular, behaviorist attempts to explain language acquisition explicitly rejected the idea of explaining how language acquisition can be so rapid and accurate.

Though mid-century stimulus/response theories of language acquisition have been discarded, there are new versions of tabula rasa (or nearly rasa anyway) theories based on the idea of probabilistic models. These suffer from the same problem: the limited and corrupt data available to the language learner cannot account, in a probabilistic learning model, for the rapid acquisition of linguistic competence. Anyone who has used Google Translate to view a web page in another language will see the problem at once. Translate uses probabilistic models, based on a huge and mostly sanitized corpus of translated work, to translate text. And it does a pretty good job, mostly, in making the translations intelligible. But the sorts of mistakes that it makes are ones that no native speaker would ever make, even in early childhood.

In Chomsky's view, the only way to account for rapid and accurate language competence is by means of an innate human capability for language, one in which the range of possible grammars is extremely limited, and whose surface structure is obtained by selection from a small set of possible transformations from a deep structure. The rules governing deep structure, and the rules governing transformations between deep and surface structure, constitute Universal Grammar (UG).

Chomsky formulates language as a two-way mapping from semantics to phonetics, where semantics are, as it were, attached to the deep structure, and phonemic structure is attached to the surface structure of language. So there are four components of language: phonological, surface structure, deep structure, and semantics, and rules that govern transformations within and between each of the four components. And the immediate task of linguistics is to produce models of each of the four components and to discover transformation rules that account for the known properties of human language.

In this regard, Chomsky looks back approvingly on the attempts by Cartesian rationalists and their rationalist and romantic successors in the 17th and 18th centuries to explain language acquisition. He contrasts their explanatory goals with the limited descriptive goals of the modern "empiricist" school of linguistic and psychological work, and argues that the goal of science is explanation, not mere description ("meter reading"). His frequent reference to Cartesian rationalists has brought him unearned criticism of being "anti-empirical" or even of being a Cartesian dualist. It is hard to take such criticisms seriously since even a superficial understanding of his writing on this subject shows that he sees linguistic work as depending crucially on emprirical evidence; he simply objects to the idea that the mere collection of data is a significant goal in itself. As for being a dualist: he is a methodological dualist, as described below, but is firmly grounded in the post-Newtonian world in which a mind-body dualism is a barely coherent concept.

When reading Chomsky's work on UG it is important to keep in mind certain distinctions. His work, and his account of linguistics, deals almost entirely with the logical structure of language. So, for example, he describes phonological transformations as consisting of a short set of rules that are applied cyclically to an utterance; and application of a rule is constrained by, and modifies, a hierarchy of phrase markers in the (surface) grammar. But he explicitly says that it would be "absurd" to think that this is what actually happens when someone is uttering a sentence. The model is intended to provide insight into language competence, but must not be thought of as applying to language performance. So the first distinction is between competence and performance. Regarding language performance, Chomsky's view is that at present we can do little more than spout platitudes.

A second distinction is between the logical model that represents UG and the strucures in the brain that give rise to UG. He points out that prior to investigating the intricate relationships between two entities it is necessary to have a clear understanding of those entities separately, to the extent possible. Chomsky's work has been focused entirely on UG as a function of "mind", and not as an output of "brain".

So Language and Mind is a collection of talks and essays on these subjects, starting from a group of three talks given at Berkeley in 1967 (Linguistic Contributions to the Study of Mind: past, present, future). There are an additional three talks given in the 80s covering much the same ground, and a final more recent essay in which he talks about more recent advances in linguistics, including "Principles and Parameters" (P & P), which overcome certain technical difficulties with "classical" UG. The essays range from very informal introductory and overview material to fairly technical discussions of core issues in linguistics. There is a lot of overlap, as is common in Chomsky's books. And there are lengthy refutations of a few of Chomsky's critics; again, a customary feature.

This is as good a general introduction to Chomsky's linguistics as any. For an early and more technical treatment, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax is not a bad place to start, but it deals solely with transformational / generative grammars.

[Matt Lucente · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plucked this off a shelf at work and read it in the interim before my shift began. This was a solid writing by Chomsky which basically covers his overall theory of linguistics as a field of study and as it relates to human thought. Some of what he said got pretty muddled and hard to understand in places, at least for me, but the discussion and conclusion sections after the paper itself were really helpful in parsing through all that. Chomsky really highlights here how young the study of linguistics is and how misplaced a lot of research going on at the time was. Love me some Noam.

[m2hozone · Rating 2 out of 5]

كم حجم و مزخرف!!!!
خيلى بد بود ..

[Cristina]

Troppo per me. Non ho le basi per capirlo, purtroppo. Devo partire da un livello più basso.

[Valida Karimova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dil ve Zehin en başta, çeviri yapılan dili bilmeyen okucular için yapıldı.
Örnekler olduğu gibi bırakıldı...
Dil, insan zihninin aynasıdır...
Noam Chomsky, ABD'nin en önde gelen muhalif simalarından birisidir...

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very short book which is based on a lecture by Chomsky and subsequent commentaries by a philosopher (Akeel Bilgrami), a neurobiologist (James Schwartz) and a cognitive psychologist (George Miller). Given this diverse panel, it follows that Chomsky's essay is quite broad, covering an enormous amount of topics such as Fregean semantics, computational approaches to cognition, the mind-body problem, unification prospects in the sciences, and the limits of understanding.

What's most striking about Chomsky is his unsurpassed philosophical rigor and his independence of thought. As a case in point, Chomsky is not afraid to dismiss entire philosophical traditions (if not entire branches of philosophy). According to him, mainstream philosophy of mind and language remain entirely misguided: the former insists on a Cartesian mind-body problem which has no place in serious inquiry on the nature of the world, while the latter asks questions and introduces notions that are completely alien to the empirical study of language. Consequently, if Chomsky is correct, much of contemporary philosophy needs to be abandoned! Surprisingly, his criticisms are incredibly penetrating and persuasive.

Overall, this book provides a good overview of Chomsky's philosophical views. Bilgrami's discussion is also quite interesting, especially his reflection on Chomskian, internalist semantics. Yet, for anyone wanting to get a much more comprehensive and detailed exposition of these topics, I'd recommend Chomsky's 'New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind'.

[Ghola · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chomsky addresses what he considers to be the tough questions in the cognitive sciences. He implies the field(s) are going in a direction that is counterproductive. The book is short and divided into three sections: 1. the actual paper, 2. remarks and rebuttle from 3 fellow scholars, and 3. Chomsky's conclusions. Unfortunately, the first section is very dry. The last to sections more than make up for this. It's worth the read if you are into cognition, language, or Chomsky.

[Nesrine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being an inaugural guest’s post, I hope that, while not up to the usual standards of this blog, the following content is not too far short either. By way of introduction: I am involved in the same reading group as N Pepperell, and have been invited to write some notes on several of the texts we cover. Our reading so far has aimed at doing a potted history of 20th century linguistics, and our path has arrived at Chomsky’s “Language and Mind”.

My apologies in advance for what might seem a naive and anachronistic take – none of our group are linguists by training, and therefore we have stumbling through what is no doubt a fragmentary and selected course. And I apologise for the prolixity of this, an inaugural guest’s post… In any case, what Chomsky presents in this 1968 version of his account of language is roughly as follows: there are 6 lectures, split into 2 groups of 3. The first group of 3 were based on lectures delivered at Berkeley in ’67; the second group were delivered to different audiences at different times. In this light, the didactic purpose of the book becomes clear in moving through it: Chomksy is presenting, to different audiences, in more or less technical detail, 3 distinct ideas.

Firstly, he presents in a number of guises the idea of universal grammar – where grammar is a set of rules which determine the matching of a given sound to a given meaning. Meanings belong, according to the universal grammar thesis, to a deep semantic structure; sounds belong to a surface phonological structure; and what connects the two are syntactic rules.

Secondly, he presents the related but not, in my view, essential idea that such a system is both required by all human languages, and acquired too quickly by human individuals to be accounted for by a range of cultural, social or environmental stimuli. Instead, using the Poverty of the Stimulus argument commented upon elsewhere in this blog, this system must be innate.

Thirdly, the “innateness” thesis connects his, that is to say Chomsky’s view, with a broad, important but largely forgotten tradition of rationalism (long since eclipsed by the rise of empiricism in general, and behavioralism in particular, in the human sciences).

At this stage I want to comment about one aspect of Chomsky’s argument: that semantic deep structures exist prior to their transformation into phonological surface structures. At least in his account here, it seems that every sentence – even assuming for now that in a normative account, sentences can be taken for meaning “informational statements” – must exist in some ready-made semantic form before it can go through some transformational process. However this account seems to me to miss a key aspect of language production – that most sentences develop in time. While a well-formed sentence may be reverse-engineered into into its constituent parts – into noun phrases, verb phrases and so on – it seems unlikely to me that this is how such sentences are always generated in the first place. Such analysis misses the essential fact of language utterances – that they exhibit a linearity, insofar as the start of a sentence is always before the end of the sentence. The following is a tentative stab at how I think this argument could unfold:

When I make a sentence, I can proceed in a number of ways. I can start with some logical proposition I wish to convey, then determine which is the best form for the conveyance (moulding some semantic content into phonetic or othographic form via syntactic transformations, in the Chomskyan way). But this is only one of a number of ways I can proceed. I can start with a particular phrase (“Notwithstanding Chomsky’s insightful analysis…”), then proceed with what may seem a logical extension (“… I disagree with his theory of the innateness of language”). I can also recant: “… well, actually, I agree with his analysis”). I can also forget where I ‘was’, or simply allow my semantic content to remain, perhaps wistfully, unexpressed: “…”. I can perform a number of acts, but none of those acts are irrevocably determined by some original semantic content which remains intact throughout the duration of the act. Even the original phase (“Notwithstanding Chomsky’s insightful analysis…”) does not establish a determinate meaning for the sentence in which it is found – my subsequent words can serve to undercut – with sarcasm or irony; to frame – by quoting or paraphrasing; to emphasise, castigate, or perform a number of acts which alter the meaning of an existing phrase or sentence. Chomsky’s examples always assume that a speaker who has considered what she or he wants to say before saying it, and remains committed to the saying of it at least until the saying is said – but of course there are many examples, mundane and famous, which run counter to this.

It might seem that this sort of criticism echoes those of pragmatists generally, and Searle in particular. However what is striking to me is not that sentences can do things other than make statements of fact, but rather that even when making a statement of fact, I can alter the meaning of the statement significantly at any time during its utterance. This is trivially true, in that I can always proceed as teenagers do when they append “…not!” at the end of sentence. So the point would be that it is empirically contingent for any given well-formed sentence as to whether its meaning had been determined entirely in advance of its utterance – and therefore could have undergone the sorts of sentence-wide syntactic transformations (active to passive, and so on) that Chomsky proposes. On the other hand, it seems equally plausible that for a number of sentences the syntactic form is prior to the semantic content – as in question-and-answers routines, where the answer’s syntax mirrors that of the question (“who saw Bill” – “John saw Bill” versus “who was Bill seen by?” – “Bill was seen by John“). Of particular importance in this regard is that it is possible for me to be committed to the syntax of a sentence I am about to make, before I know what I am going to say. How could I then, consciously or otherwise, apply rules to get to a known syntactic construction (for instance, a passive construction) from some as-yet unknown semantic meaning?

This is not to say, at the level of a phrase, and indeed for many sentences, there may not be processes at work transforming meaning into sound the way Chomsky describes – indeed this may even be the normative case. However it seems to me that there are many other ways sentences can be formed, and these show that a more complex relationship exists between the semantic, syntactic and phonological parts of a sentence than what Chomsky – circa 1968 – will allow.

Quite possibly, later Chomsky or other more recent accounts resolve this problem in some way – if indeed it is a problem. Meanwhile, we are now moving on to How to do Things with Words…

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sprache und Geist ist sicherlich kein schlechtes Buch. Es hat halt nur das gewaltige Problem, dass es auf drei Vorlesungen aus dem Jahr 1967 basiert, also der Inhalt in diesem Jahr 50 Jahre alt wird. Dadurch ist natürlich auch der Stand der Linguistik und der Psychologie ziemlich veraltet, ebenso gab es nach dem strukturellen Paradigma auch noch so etwas wie das poststrukturelle Paradigma.

Dennoch ist der Inhalt, soweit ich das beurteilen kann, gut beschrieben und beschreibt Forschungsstand der damaligen Zeit.

Im Teil zur Gegenwart kommt die Oberfächen- und Tiefenstruktur von Chomsky in der damaligen Form kommt gut zur Geltung und wird gut erklärt. Ebenso werden interessante Regeln im syntaktischen und phonologischen Bereich erläutert, was ich wirklich gut dargestellt und spannend fand. Aber Chomsky gibt auch Hinweise auf weitere Forschungsergebnisse aus der damaligen Zeit, wobei ich von den zitierten Personen zumeist noch nie etwas gehört habe. Keine Ahnung also ob deren Theorien sich langfristig durchgesetzt haben.

Im Teil zur Vergangenheit gibt Chomsky sehr interessante historische Einblicke mit drei Schwerpunkten, den auf Descartes basierenden Cartesianern und deren Einstellung zum menschlichen Geist, die „philosophische“ oder „universale“ Grammatik beginnend im 17. Jahrhundert sowie eben den Strukturalisten beginnend mit Saussure.

Der abschließende Teil über die Zukunft beschäftigt sich weniger mit konkreten Vorhersagen als vielmehr mit Problemen, mit denen sich die Linguistik (und Verhaltensforschung allgemein) laut Chomsky in Zukunft noch auseinandersetzen werden müsse. Das ist aus heutiger Sicht natürlich ein unmöglich adäquat zu beschreibendes Unterfangen, auch wenn Chomsky manche Probleme recht gut prognostiziert hat. Dennoch war der Wandel hier zu groß, mit neuen Entwicklungen im technischen Bereich und der Neurolinguistik, als dass dieser Teil heute mehr wäre als historisch interessante Bestandsaufnahme aus den 1960er Jahren.

[Mobina golsefatan · Rating 5 out of 5]

بسم الله
بخشی از مقدمه‌ی مترجم:
"زبان و اندیشه شکل مکتوب بحثی است که به سال 1993 در میزگردی با حضور نوام چامسکی، استاد زبان‌شناسی و فلسفه دانشگاه کلمبیا، جورج میلر، استاد روان‌شناسی دانشگاه پرینستون و جیمز شوارتس، استاد زیست‌شناسی اعصاب دانشکده پزشکی دانشگاه کلمبیا برگزار شد."

روال کتاب به این صورت است که ابتدا چامسکی آرا و نظراتش را بیان می‌کند سپس هریک از اساتید در این رابطه حرف‌هایی می‌زنند و در انتها چامسکی در جواب آن‌ها و جمع‌بندی حرف خودش مطالبی را بیان می‌کند.
اما موضوع کتاب یا سخنرانی چامسکی دقیقا چیست؟
شاید عنوان کتاب قدری غلط‌‌انداز باشد و گمان کنید با مطالبی در حوزه‌ی اندیشه و زبان‌شناسی طرفید که خب نیستید :)
خلاصه می‌کنم و آسمان و ریسمان برایتان نمی‌بافم. در این کتاب شما با نگاه چامسکی در حوزه علوم شناختی آشنا خواهید شد. به نظر من باید قدری تاریخ و فلسفه علم بلد باشید. مفاهیم وعباراتی مثل "تقلیل گرایی"، "فلسفه مکانیستی"، "رفتارگرایی"، "آزمون تورینگ"و "اتاق چینی" برایتان ناآشنا نباشد تا بتوانید با کتاب ارتباط برقرار کنید.
البته شاید هنوز هم ارتباط برقرارکردن با بخش ابتدایی کتاب (شاید به خاطر نامانوس بودن با ترجمه) سخت باشد.
درکل این کتاب برای اهالی ادبیات و مشتاقان زبان‌شناسی نیست :)
اما اگر دوست دارید بدانید چامسکی چه نگاهی به مفهوم زبان در جهان هوش مصنوعی و علوم شناختی دارد برایتان جالب خواهد بود.

+ نمی‌دانم هنوز هم چامسکی همین‌طور فکر می‌کند یا نه ولی من که با نگاهش موافقم :))))
شاید اگر بیشتر از چامسکی و درباره اش بخوانم این متن را تغییر دهم
فعلا که همین.

بخشی از متن کتاب:
"من هم مایلم به نوبه خود از شرکت‌کنندگان در این میزگرد، بویژه نوام چامسکی و چارلز ریسکامپ، تشکر کنم و یادآور شوم که در این میان به شاعران توجهی نشد، هرچند پروفسور چامسکی، به شکلی تلویحی به این نکته اشاره داشتند که آنان، یعنی همانا شاعران، احتمالا نمونه بارزی از رمز و راز خلاقیتِ ذهن /مغز /روح، و حتی اندیشه، اخلاق، شعور، خرد و زبان به‌شمار می‌روند."

[Liam Battle]

Feel like a rating is sort of pointless for this book? Probably all books?

Very interesting and started to get at the possibilities of perception which concern me. Going to have to branch out into his earlier writing (Structures, Aspects, Cartesian Linguistics) before coming back to this. Affirmed a lot of what I believe to be true about the human mind and it’s relationship with art but not in any concrete way. I’ll also have to get into some more concrete writing on aesthetics, analytic philosophy, and classical rationalism to really get into this. In any case, I’m glad this is leading me away from Locke.

Not sure I fully understood on a first read, but all of the points made and questions raised have relevance in the arts, politics, and our general consumption of culture.

[乂]

زبان و اندیشه / نوآم چامسکی / تهران: هرمس، چاپِ چهارم 1391
زبان-روان‌شناسی، اندیشه و تفکر


پیش‌گفتار
رابطه‌ی میان روان آدمی و گفتار، پیچیده‌تر از آن‌است که همه‌ی ظرایف‌اش را بتوان فهمید.
زبان، یکی از راه‌های عقلانی ارتباط ما با دیگران است البته زبان، برای توصیف عواطف و احساسات نیز به‌کار می‌رود، که توضیح این عواطف، غالباً به قابلیت‌هایی فراتر از تحلیل‌های عقلانی نیاز دارد وگرنه به‌عنوان مثال: توصیف خوش‌رایحه بودن یک گل سرخ، صرفاً با استفاده از تحلیلی عقلانی، فقط درحد توضیحی شیمیایی باقی خواهد ماند. [1]
زبان نه‌تنها برای آن‌است که بیان کند و ارتباط برقرار سازد و استدلال کند و نتیجه بگیرد، برای میسر کردن تجسم نیز هست. [3]
زبان، فقط جهت بیان حدیث نفس و ارتباط برقرارکردن به‌کار نمی‌آید، بل‌که در جهت‌یابی و درک وضعیت‌مان نیز به کمک می‌آید. نیازی به جستجوی کلام نیست، کلام و سخن درون ما نهفته است. [4]
زبان و اندیشه
اگر کل مسائلی که چهل‌سال پیش در رشته‌های زبان‌شناسی مطرح بود را جمع کنیم باز هم تنها بخش کوچکی از برنامه‌ی آموزشی امروز این رشته را تشکیل می‌دهد. بله، آن‌روزها سپری شده است اما باید توجه داشت که تخصصی‌شدن، دلیلی بر پیش‌رفت نیست به‌خصوص اگر به فداکردن بینش‌های عمیق علمی به‌پای بررسی‌های کم‌اهمیت فنی بیانجامد. [5]
ولتر معقد بود: «متافیزیک، رقصی با حرکات موزون و پرشکوه است که در همان آغاز به پایان می‌رسد». و ما نیز در مواجه با ادعاهایی که نوید دست‌یابی به هوش مصنوعی و انقلاب در شناخت می‌دهند باید توجه داشته باشیم که میان جلب نظر افکار عمومی و کسب دست‌آوردی پژوهشی، تفاوت بسیار است. [6]
انسان، مالک گنجینه‌ای عام و مشترک از افکار است که از نسلی به نسل دیگر منتقل می‌شود. این افکار، توسط زبانی عمومی و از طریق نشانه‌هایی مشترک بیان می‌شوند. این نشانه‌ها، به مفاهیم و مصادیقی اشاره می‌کنند که در خارج از ذهن ما قرار دارند. و یا به شیئی خارج از مصداق خود تخصیص یافته‌اند، یا درصددند که مفهوم مرجع خود را قابل درک می‌کنند. [7]
این فرض بنیادین که «میان آدمیان، ذخیره‌ای عام و مشترک از افکار وجود دارد» را می‌توان مورد تردید قرار داد. [8] زیرا انباره و شراکتی به این عامی نمی‌توان تصور کرد. گفتن این‌که مردم افکار مشترکی دارند به این معنی است که آن‌ها یکسان فکر می‌کنند. برای اثبات این‌که فکر نیز مانند الماس موجودیتی «تملک‌پذیر» دارد، به استدلال نیاز است. [9]
در مطالعات مربوط به فلسفه‌ی زبان و معناشناسی، نوعی از این فرض نیز بدیهی انگاشته شده است که افکار مشترک، از طریق زبانی مشترک، میان مردم بیان و انتقال داده می‌شوند. و زبان‌های مشترک، مستقل از سخنگویان خود نیز وجود دارند [9] و هریک از ما تنها بخشی از یک زبان را درک می‌کنیم و گاه همان بخش را هم با اشتباهاتی می‌فهمیم. اما این نظر با مطالعات تجربی زبان بیگانه است. [10]
وجود داشتن «معنایی مشترک و عام» در امر ارتباط شاید موضوع قابل طرحی باشد زیرا استعدادهای زبانی دارای ویژگی‌های شدیداً محدودکننده‌ای هستند و بسیار اندک به تنوع‌داشتن راه می‌دهند.
بحث‌های نظری به ندرت پایبند به محدوده‌های برآمده از «دانش عوام» است پس گاهی برای طرح مباحث خود باید اصطلاحاتی فنی‌تر ساخت. [14]
این جمله که: «پریروز با بی‌بی‌سی مصاحبه کردم و از بدترشدن قیافه‌ی شهر بهتم زده بود.» ممکن است شنونده را به این گمان رهنمون کند که اشاره‌ی من به لندن است. حال آن‌که من هیچ واژه‌ای در حرفم به‌کار نبرده‌ام که از آن بتوان معنای لندن را استخراج کرد. [14] اگر بگویم: «لندن، کنار رودخانه‌ی تیمز قرار دارد یا ندارد.» آیا اشاره‌ی من به لندن، اشاره به موجودیتی قابل اتکاء است؟ پاسخ مثبت به این پرسش عجیب خواهد بود زیرا ممکن است سال‌ها بعد تحت شرایطی خاص، شهر لندن بکلی ویران شود و دوباره در جایی دیگر بنا شود؛ و اشارات ما به آن، باز هم اشاراتی به لندن تلقی شود. توصیفات چارلز دیکنز از شهر واشنگتن، با آن‌چه که امروز از این شهر می‌بینیم دچار گسترش بسیار شده است اما این شهر باز هم هامن واشنگتن است. [15]

وقتی مفهومی فنی را درون چهارچوبی نظری پیشنهاد می‌کنم، مایلم دیگران این نکته را دریابند که به موجودیتی واقعی اشاره می��کنم. [22]
وقتی به‌دنبال شناخت و درک نظری هستیم، از واژه‌ی «لندن» استفاده نمی‌کنیم، زیرا به‌شکل گیج‌کننده‌ای به موضوعاتی مختلف اشاره می‌کند. [22]
آیا علم، صرفاً نوعی درک متعارف است که با زبانی پالایش‌یافته مطرح می‌شود؟ آیا هدف علم، دست‌یابی به زبانی کامل است؟ آیا محدوده‌ای آرمانی وجود دارد که در آن زبان و اندیشه، می‌توانند بدون مقاومت به‌هم نزدیک و نزدیک‌تر می‌شوند؟ [22]
[...]


از متن مقدمه و پشت جلد کتاب: زبان و اندیشه، شکل مکتوب شده‌ی بحثی است که در سال 1993م، میان نوآم چامسکی و برخی اساتید دانشگاه‌های امریکا در رشته‌های فلسفه، زبان‌شناسی، زیست‌شناسی اعصاب، و روان‌شناسی انجام شده است. روال این‌گونه بوده که ابتدا چامسکی، طرح خود درباره‌ی زبان و اندیشه را در قالب یک مقاله ارائه کند، سپس سه‌تن از حاضرین، دیدگاه‌های خود درباره‌ی نظریات چامسکی را مطرح کنند، و پس از آن پرسش و پاسخی میان حاضرین و چامسکی برقرار شود.
در این نشست، چامسکی، با برخی از روش‌های متداول در زبان‌شناسی و روان‌شناسی مخالفت می‌کند، روش‌هایی که بسیاری از آن‌ها توسط پیروان روش‌های ابداعی خود او انجام شده‌اند. و در ادامه نیز ضمن آن‌که میان «مسئله» و «راز»، تمایز قطعی قائل می‌شود، معتقد است درک رازها، ورای ظرفیت شناختی انسان قرار دارد.

فهرست
مقدمه‌ی مترجم هفت
پیش‌گفتار 1
زبان و اندیشه 5
گفت‌وگو 53
پایان سخن 78
نمایه 99

شناسنامه
سرشناسه: چامسکی، نوآم، 1928م
عنوان: زبان و اندیشه
پدیدآور: نوآم چامسکی Noam Chomsky
مشخصات نشر: تهران: هرمس، 1391ش
مشخصات ظاهری: هشت+100 صفحه
شابک: 9789647100649
ترجمه از: Language and Thought
موضوع: زبان-روان‌شناسی، اندیشه و تفکر
مترجم: کورش صفوی، 1335ش
نوبت چاپ: چهارم
سال انتشار: 1391
شمارگان: 1000 نسخه
قیمت: 3500 تومان

[A30 · Rating 5 out of 5]

به این فکر بکنید که هزارن سال پیش گونه ای از انسان کلمه ای در دست رس نداشته که به یک انسان دیگر بگوید دوستت دارم :( البته کتاب حول این قضیه پیش نمیره و توجه و تمرکزش روی اندیشه هست

[Moh. Nasiri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glimpse of Chomsky's linguistics theories and idea ,nice to read

[Arno Mosikyan]

QUOTES

Darwin asked rhetorically why “thought, being a secretion of the brain,” should be considered “more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter.”

Thus, normal human intelligence is capable of acquiring knowledge through its own internal resources, perhaps making use of the data of sense but going on to construct a cognitive system in terms of concepts and principles that are developed on independent grounds; and it is capable of generating new thoughts and of finding appropriate and novel ways of expressing them, in ways that entirely transcend any training or experience.

In fact, as Descartes himself quite correctly observed, language is a species-specific human possession, and even at low levels of intelligence, at pathological levels, we find a command of language that is totally unattainable by an ape that may, in other respects, surpass a human imbecile in problem-solving ability and other adaptive behavior.

a person’s knowledge of language is representable as a stored set of patterns, overlearned through constant repetition and detailed training, with innovation being at most a matter of “analogy.”

Honesty forces us to admit that we are as far today as Descartes was three centuries ago from understanding just what enables a human to speak in a way that is innovative, free from stimulus control, and also appropriate and coherent.

Thus, in his terms, sentence formation is not strictly a matter of langue, but is rather assigned to what he called parole, and thus placed outside the scope of linguistics proper; it is a process of free creation, unconstrained by linguistic rule except insofar as such rules govern the forms of words and the patterns of sounds.

Accordingly, knowledge of language must develop slowly through repetition and training, its apparent complexity resulting from the proliferation of very simple elements rather than from deeper principles of mental organization that may be as inaccessible to introspection as the mechanisms of digestion or coordinated movement.

The person who has acquired knowledge of a language has internalized a system of rules that relate sound and meaning in a particular way.

Linguistics, so characterized, is simply the subfield of psychology that deals with these aspects of mind.

Knowledge of a language involves the ability to assign deep and surface structures to an infinite range of sentences, to relate these structures appropriately, and to assign a semantic interpretation and a phonetic interpretation to the paired deep and surface structures.

It is clear, in short, that the surface structure is often misleading and uninformative and that our knowledge of language involves properties of a much more abstract nature, not indicated directly in the surface structure.

We live, after all, in the age of “behavioral science,” not of “the science of mind.”

Anyone concerned with the study of human nature and human capacities must somehow come to grips with the fact that all normal humans acquire language, whereas acquisition of even its barest rudiments is quite beyond the capacities of an otherwise intelligent ape – a fact that was emphasized, quite correctly, in Cartesian philosophy.

For this reason, it was possible for him to maintain the rationalist view that language is not really learned – certainly not taught – but rather develops “from within,” in an essentially predetermined way, when the appropriate environmental conditions exist.

Hence the fascination of this study, and, no less, its frustration. The frustration arises from the fact that despite much progress, we remain as incapable as ever before of coming to grips with the core problem of human language, which I take to be this: having mastered a language, one is able to understand an indefinite number of expressions that are new to one’s experience, that bear no simple physical resemblance and are in no simple way analogous to the expressions that constitute one’s linguistic experience; and one is able, with greater or less facility, to produce such expressions on an appropriate occasion, despite their novelty and independently of detectable stimulus configurations, and to be understood by others who share this still mysterious ability. (less)

There is no human language in which it is possible, in fact or in principle, to specify a certain sentence as the longest sentence meaningful in this language.

the grammar of a language must, for empirical adequacy, allow for infinite use of finite means,

David Hume remarked; and, as Darwin commented a century later, there is no reason why “thought, being a secretion of the brain,” should be considered “more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter.”

[Claudio · Rating 3 out of 5]

I approached this essay (or, rather, this short collection of essays) mostly because I wanted to read about the theory of Universal Grammar from its very source. I was looking for some sort of unabridged version instead of the brief, watered-down mentions one can always find in some textbook on theoretical computer science.

And I did find that.

But I also found something else. I found a clear, firm, even-tempered voice wrestling against the fashionable trend of behaviorism (or “science of meter reading”) which, in Chomsky’s view, gives up any attempt to really understand, and focuses instead on merely describing the data. Chomsky goes as far as looking back approvingly on the attempts by Cartesian rationalists to explain language acquisition (something, to put it mildly, very unpopular for his time). Even though I won’t deny that some of the analyses in this book have not aged very well, Chomsky’s dire unhappiness with the “conception that knowledge of language can be accounted for as a system of habits” really resonates in this day and age, where scientists and researchers are too galvanized by the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data to try and look beyond scatter plots and histograms.

Well put, Noam.