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Reflections on Language

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New York. 21 cm. 269 p. Encuadernación en tapa blanda de editorial. Idioma Inglés. Noam Chomsky. Includes index. p. [255]-265 .. Este libro es de segunda mano y tiene o puede tener marcas y señales de su anterior propietario. 0394499565; 0394731239 (pbk.)

269 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

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About the author

Noam Chomsky

975 books17.2k followers
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.

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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
Profile Image for John Hatley.
1,383 reviews231 followers
June 15, 2021
As unqualified as I am to “review” any book, I am hopelessly unqualified to “review” this one. Any recommendations that I could possibly make would be to that vast section of humanity that is far more intelligent than I am.
Profile Image for Philippe Quartz.
11 reviews1 follower
June 19, 2023
The books claim to being "nontechnical" feels a bit odd when you start to get waist deep into all the "LT(O,D)" and rationalism vs. empiricism stuff. That being said, when it isn't too dense, the ideas that he brings up about these things can be really interesting. Some of the less formal reflections about language learning and its relation to ideas about human nature and social/political stuff were killer too.
Profile Image for Kent Winward.
1,794 reviews65 followers
August 5, 2014
This is one of those books that I finished just so I could say I did. Jargon laden and filled with academic dispute minutiae unless you are a total linguistic junkie, probably not much to recommend this as a beach read. From the layman's perspective, Chomsky's universal grammar is just part of the larger nature v. nurture argument. Certainly, we humans have some innate language capabilities given the fact that you are reading this and I read this book, but just because we have an innate language ability, doesn't mean we can understand this book.
Profile Image for Michael.
5 reviews
May 19, 2010
I expected this book to be written for the enlightened layperson (i.e. the English major with a good knowledge of grammar and syntax). It was replete with transformational grammar jargon and offered almost no examples from regular usage. It is helpful to have a reasonable understanding of Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar, or you will get totally lost.
10.4k reviews33 followers
October 17, 2024
THE FAMED LINGUIST SUMMARIZES HIS IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE

Avram Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political commentator, and outspoken social activist. He is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He wrote in the Preface to this 1975 book, “Part I of this book is an elaboration of the Whidden Lectures, delivered in January … To preserve the internal coherence of the discussion in part II, I have retained some material that recapitulates themes that are developed in a somewhat different form in the Whidden Lectures.”

He notes, “Investigating the cognitive ability of humans, we might consider, say, the ability to recognize and identify faces on exposure to a few presentations, to determine the personality structure of another person on brief contact… to recognize a melody under transposition and other modifications, to handle those branches of mathematics that build on numerical or spatial intuition, to create art forms resting on certain principles of structure and organization, and so on. Humans appear to have characteristic and remarkable abilities in these domains, in that they construct a complex and intricate intellectual system, rapidly and uniformly, on the basis of degenerate evidence. And structures created by particularly talented individuals within these constraints are intelligible and appealing, exciting and thought-provoking even to those not endowed with unusual creative abilities.” (Pg. 21-22)

He observes, “I argued that the principle of structure-dependence must be attributed to universal grammar, since it is used correctly in the cases illustrated there even in the absence of relevant experience… It is difficult to imagine that every speaker of English who is capable of the discriminations on which the argument is based has been given instruction, or even relevant evidence, to establish the fact. A far more reasonable assumption is that the general principles … are simply innate to the language faculty, on part of the schematism that determines admissible grammars and the ways in which their rules apply, thus determining the class of languages accessible to humans by application of the language facility.” (Pg. 91)

He states, “The study of language falls naturally within human biology. The language faculty, which somehow evolved inhuman prehistory, makes possible the amazing feat of language learning, while inevitably setting limits on the kinds of language that can be acquired in the normal way, interacting with other faculties of mind, it makes possible the coherent and creative use of language in ways that we can sometimes describe, but hardly even begin to understand.” (Pg. 123)

He asserts, “we may say that humans are innately endowed with a system of intellectual organization, call it the ‘initial state’ of the mind. Through interaction with the environment and maturational processes, the mind passes through a sequence of states in which cognitive structures are represented. In the case of language, it is fairly obvious that rapid and extensive changes take place during an early period of life, and a ‘steady state’ is achieved which then undergoes only minor modification. Abstracting away from the latter, we can refer to the steady state as the ‘final state’ of the mind, in which knowledge of language is somehow represented. We can construct hypotheses concerning the initial and final states, and can proceed to validate, or reject, or sharpen these hypotheses by methods of inquiry that are familiar.” (Pg. 137-138)

He points out, “To the extent that [a person] succeeds in characterizing the innate properties of mind that make possible the learning of grammar and common sense, he would be able to explain why these systems are qualitatively so different from the third cognitive structures mentioned earlier, knowledge of physics. That is, he would now regard the properties of mind that underlie the acquisition of language and common sense as biological properties of the organism, on a par in this respect with those that enable a bird to build a nest or reproduce a characteristic song; or, for that matter, comparable to the properties that account for the development of particular organs of the body… Humans are not specially adapted, in the same way, to the learning of physics.” (Pg. 155)

He argues, “Equally misleading, I think, is the tendency in philosophical discussions to speculate on the ways in which language and its use might be taught. Language is not really taught, for the most part. Rather, it is learned, by mere exposure to the data. No one has been taught the principle of structure-dependence of rules… Nor is there any reason to suppose that people are taught the meaning of words. It may be true that ‘teaching someone how to use an expression is the native soil from which talk about meaning has grown,’ but this historical comment gives little reason to suppose that explanations of meaning are exhausted, or even advanced, by an account of teaching. The study of how a system is learned cannot be identified with the study of how it is taught; nor can we assume that what is learned has been taught.” (Pg. 161)

This is an extremely thought-provoking book, that provides an excellent summation of Chomsky’s view of language at this point. It will be of great value to anyone studying modern linguistics.

Profile Image for T.  Tokunaga .
213 reviews1 follower
March 9, 2025
【Schoolroom Grammar and Generative Grammar / Reflections on Language / Noam Chomsky】

I actually suspect if Chomsky has the tendency to take criticism on his theory that on his personality. He reputed an academic criticism from philosopher Strawson by the adjective "perverse" (p72), which is written as if it was Strawson's remark (and yet not cited).

And it's quite easy to question Chomsky theory. He doesn't set limitations to his universal grammar theory, so a reader would find endless list of ambiguous objects. Music? Choreography? Picture? Painting? Sculpture? Martial Arts? Even mathematics is on the edge.

Even though his ideas on semantics and syntax correlating to form a phrase interesting, it'd be pretty common sensical to those who learned schoolroom grammar in Japan (Japanese is too much different from Indo-European languages not to develop quasi-generative method when it comes to language acquisition). Even dummy sentences shown in P94 looks like a schoolroom dummy sentence to show structures in a Japanese middle school. Those grammatically ambiguous dummies (P151) are so similar to their English compositions. And he avoided talking about Japanese, a language he didn't know, shoving off as "something else." (P196)

It's ironical to see this universal grammar has to be taught at Japanese schools where people don't share the system - okay, but I am offended. Am I something extra-human, if it really is universal...?
1,618 reviews
November 8, 2024
Has some linguistics jargon so is not entirely for the general reader and it is not clear his main beliefs regarding the nature of language with respect to humankind are well-founded, especially in light of the emergence of AI.
67 reviews6 followers
July 2, 2011
This is my first Chomsky book, and I have to say, I am now officially a fan! I sense his writing to be very humble, (although some could his self-defensive passages to be read as egotistical and machoistic), because he never drifts away from the priorities of the discussion, and does not let pride spoil content. His writing also strikes a fabulous balance between scientific inquiry and artful philosophy, which I find to be a valuable approach that one can apply to any research in the humanities. I can't wait to see how he writes about politics!
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