http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/517
This is a link about The biology of the language of Noam Chomsky. For me it was so interesting and for that reason i wanted to share it with all of you :D i hope you like it.
jueves, 24 de noviembre de 2011
Chomsky on Semantics
The study of meaning and reference and of the use of language should be excluded from the field of linguistics. . . . Given a lingustic theory, the concepts of grammer are constructed (so it seems) on the basis of primitive notions that are not semantic (where the grammar contains the phonology and syntax), but that the linguistic theory itself must be chosen so as to provide the best possible explanation of semantic phenomena, as well as others.
"It seems that other cognitive systems -- in particular, our system of beliefs concerning things in the world and their behavior -- playan essential part in our judments of meaning and reference, in an extremely intricate manner, and it is not at all clear that much will remain if we try to separate the purely linguistic components of what in informal usage or even in technical discussion we call 'the meaning of lingustic expression.' "
"He showed that surface structure played a much more important role in semantic interpretation that had been supposed; if so, then the Standard hypothesis, according to which it was the deep structure that completely determined this interpretation, is false."
Chomsky on Language Acquisition
According to Noam Chomsky, the mechanism of language acquisition formulates from innate processes. This theory is evidenced by children who live in the same linguistic community without a plethora of different experiences who arrive at comparable grammars. Chomsky thus proposes that "all children share the same internal contraints which characterize narrowly the grammar they are going to construct." (Chomsky, 1977, p.98) Since we live in a biological world, "there is no reason for supposing the mental world to be an exception." And he believes that there is a critical age for learningn a language as is true for the overall development of the human body.
Chomsky's mechanism of language acquisition also links structural linguistics to empiricist thought: "These principles [of structuralism and empiricism] determine the type of grammars that are available in principles. They are associated with an evaluation procedure which, given possible grammars, selects the best one. The evaluation procedure is also part of the biological given. The acquisition of language thus is a process of selection of the best grammar compatible with the available data. If the principles can be made sufficiently restrictive, there will also be a kind of 'discovery procedure.
Noam Chomsky Biography
Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His undergraduate and graduate years were spent at the University of Pennsylvania where he received his PhD in linguistics in 1955. During the years 1951 to 1955, Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. While a Junior Fellow he completed his doctoral dissertation entitled, "Transformational Analysis." The major theoretical viewpoints of the dissertation appeared in the monograph Syntactic Structure, which was published in 1957. This formed part of a more extensive work, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, circulated in mimeograph in 1955 and published in 1975.
Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.) From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics.
martes, 22 de noviembre de 2011
Some Works by Chomsky.
Chomsky, Noam. (1964). Current issues in linguistic theory.
The Hague: Mouton.
--- (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax.
Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
--- (1966). Cartesian linguistics: a chapter in the history of
rationalist thought. New York: Harper & Row.
--- (1966). Topics in the theory of generative grammar.
The Hague: Mouton.
--- (1966). Perspectives on Vietnam: [microform] speech by Noam
Chomsky as part of a program presented by the Faculty Peace Committee, November 10, 1966, at the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley: Academic Publishing.
--- (1968). Language and mind. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World.
--- (1968). Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.
--- (1969). American Power and the New Mandarins.
Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.
--- (1969). I nuovi mandarini; gli intellettuali e il potere in America.
Torino: G. Einaudi.
--- (1969) L'Amerique et ses Nouveaux Mandarins.
Paris, Editions du Seuil
--- (1970). "Notes on Anarchism," New York Review of Books. v. 14,
no 10, May 21, 1970, pp. 31-35.
--- (1970). At war with Asia. New York: Pantheon Books.
--- (1970). Two essays on Cambodia. Nottingham:
Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation for The Spokesman.
--- (1971). Chomsky: selected readings. edited by J. P. B. Allen and Paul
Van Buren. London, New York: Oxford University Press.
--- (1971). Problems of knowledge and freedom. New York:
Pantheon Books.
--- Jakobson, Roman, Halle, Morris. (1972). Hypothèses,
trois entretiens et trois études sur la linguistique et la poétique.
[Traduction,] présentations et contributions de Jean-Pierre Faye,
Jean Paris, Jacques Roubaud, Mitsou Ronat.
Paris: Seghers, Laffont.
[Traduction,] présentations et contributions de Jean-Pierre Faye,
Jean Paris, Jacques Roubaud, Mitsou Ronat.
Paris: Seghers, Laffont.
--- (1972). Language and mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
--- (1972). Studies on semantics in generative grammar. The Hague:
Mouton.
--- (1972). Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.
--- (1973). Conoscenza e libertá. Torino: Einaudi.
--- (1973). For reasons of state. New York: Pantheon Books.
--- (1974). Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on justice and nationhood.
Theory
Although known that there are structures of the brain that control the interpretation and production of speech, it was not clear as to how humans acquired language ability, both in its interpretive sense and its production. This is where Noam Chomsky made his contribution.
There are a few factors that Chomsky has used to support his theory of language acquisition. First is that there is an optimal learning age. Between the ages 3 to 10 a child is the most likely to learn a language in its entirety and grasp fluency. After this age, it is hard and even considered impossible for the child to completely grasp the language. This is why school systems are criticized for teaching foreign languages in high school and not in elementary.
The second factor is that the child does not need a trigger to begin language acquisition, it happens on its own. The parent does not need to coax the child to speak, if it around language production, the child will work to produce that language on its own. Several things may help the child develop faster, such as the parent producing baby talk, or being read to on a consistent basis. But these things only have a small effect, and if they are not done, the child will still eventually learn to speak without them.
Another factor found was that it does not matter if a child is corrected, they still grasp the language in the same manner and speak the same way. During one stage, a child will make things plural that are already plural. For example, a child will say geeses instead of geese. It does not matter how many times a child is corrected, the child still says geeses. In one documented case, a child, after being corrected several times by the mother to say feet instead of feets, looked at the mother, said "ohh," as if she understood and then proceeded to say feets.
Another fact is that children go through stages of language acquisition in which they learn certain parts of the language. They all go through these stages at the same time, around the same age. A child in China, will follow the same linguistic patterns of language acquisition as a child in the United States. It is with these observations, along with knowledge about neurological structures that control linguistic communication and interpretation, that Chomsky argues that language is innately organized.
Generative Grammar by Noam Chomsky
Generative grammar is a notion that was developed in 1950s by Noam Chomsky. Although numerous scholars disagreed with Chomsky’s claims he gained many supporters and the idea was both developed and challenged at the same time. His works have exerted considerable influence on psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics as well as language methodology, and with time ‘generative grammar’ received broader meaning than it initially had.
Based partially on mathematical equations generative grammar is a set of rules that provide a framework for all the grammatically possible sentences in a language, excluding those which would be considered ungrammatical. A classical generative grammar consists of four elements:
A limited number of nonterminal signs;
A beginning sign which is contained in the limited number of nonterminal signs;
A limited number of terminal signs;
A finite set of rules which enable rewriting nonterminal signs as strings of terminal signs.
The rules could be applied in a free way and the only requirement is that the final result must be a grammatically correct sentence. What is more, generative grammar is recursive, which means that any output of application of rules can be the input for subsequent application of the same rule. That should enable generating sentences as the daughter ofthe father of the brother of his cousin.
Chomsky considered language to be a species-specific property which is a part of the human mind. Chomsky studied the Internal-language, a mental faculty for language. He also wanted to account for the linguistic competence of native speakers and the linguistic knowledge of language present in language users’ minds. As he argued:
People know which sentences are grammatically well formed in their native language
They have this knowledge also of previously unheard sentences
So they must rely on mentally represented rules and not only on memory
Generative grammars might be regarded as models of mentally represented rules
The ability to acquire such sets of rules is most probably uniquely human.
Moreover, Chomsky argued that people posses a kind of Language Faculty which is a part of human natural biological qualities. The innate linguistic knowledge that enables practically any child to learn any of about 6000 existing languages (at a given point in time) is sometimes known as theUniversal Grammar. This theory is often supported by the arguments that creole languages are created in a natural way and their users invent their own linguistic systems. What is more, it appears that creole languages share certain features even despite the distances that not allows for contact of two different creoles.
Life and basic ideas.
Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Chomsky attended an experimental elementary school in which he was encouraged to develop his own interests and talents through self-directed learning. When he was 10 years old, he wrote an editorial for his school newspaper lamenting the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe. His research then and during the next few years was thorough enough to serve decades later as the basis of Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship (1969), Chomsky's critical review of a study of the period by the historian Gabriel Jackson.
When he was 13 years old, Chomsky began taking trips by himself to New York City, where he found books for his voracious reading habit and made contact with a thriving working-class Jewish intellectual community. Discussion enriched and confirmed the beliefs that would underlie his political views throughout his life: that all people are capable of comprehending political and economic issues and making their own decisions on that basis; that all people need and derive satisfaction from acting freely and creatively and from associating with others; and that authority—whether political, economic, or religious—that cannot meet a strong test of rational justification is illegitimate. According to Chomsky's anarchosyndicalism, or libertarian socialism, the best form of political organization is one in which all people have a maximal opportunity to engage in cooperative activity with others and to take part in all decisions of the community that affect them. In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky entered the University of Pennsylvania but found little to interest him. After two years he considered leaving the university to pursue his political interests, perhaps by living on a kibbutz. He changed his mind, however, after meeting the linguist Zellig S. Harris, one of the American founders of structural linguistics, whose political convictions were similar to Chomsky's. Chomsky took graduate courses with Harris and, at Harris's recommendation, studied philosophy with Nelson Goodman and Nathan Salmon and mathematics with Nathan Fine, who was then teaching at Harvard University. In his 1951 master's thesis, The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, and especially in The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, written while he was a junior fellow at Harvard (1951–55) and published in part in 1975, Chomsky adopted aspects of Harris's approach to the study of language and of Goodman's views on formal systems and the philosophy of science and transformed them into something novel.
Whereas Goodman assumed that the mind at birth is largely a tabula rasa (blank slate) and that language learning in children is essentially a conditioned response to linguistic stimuli, Chomsky held that the basic principles of all languages, as well as the basic range of concepts they are used to express, are innately represented in the human mind and that language learning consists of the unconscious construction of a grammar from these principles in accordance with cues drawn from the child's linguistic environment. Whereas Harris thought of the study of language as the taxonomic classification of “data,” Chomsky held that it is the discovery, through the application of formal systems, of the innate principles that make possible the swift acquisition of language by children and the ordinary use of language by children and adults alike. And whereas Goodman believed that linguistic behaviour is regular and caused (in the sense of being a specific response to specific stimuli), Chomsky argued that it is incited by social context and discourse context but essentially uncaused enabled by a distinct set of innate principles but innovative, or creative. It is for this reason that Chomsky believed that it is unlikely that there will ever be a full-fledged science of linguistic behaviour. As in the view of the 17th-century French philosopher Réne Descartes, according to Chomsky, the use of language is due to a creative principle, not a causal one.
Noam Chomsky
"...People would like to think that there's somebody up there who knows what he's doing. Since we don't participate, we don't control and we don't even think about questions of vital importance. We hope somebody is paying attention who has some competence. Let's hope the ship has a captain, in other words, since we're not taking part in what's going on...
It is an important feature of the igeological system to impose on people the feeling that they really are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues: they'd better leave it to the captain. One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives and to control international affairs...."
It is an important feature of the igeological system to impose on people the feeling that they really are incompetent to deal with these complex and important issues: they'd better leave it to the captain. One device is to develop a star system, an array of figures who are media creations or creations of the academic propaganda establishment, whose deep insights we are supposed to admire and to whom we must happily and confidently assign the right to control our lives and to control international affairs...."
- Noam Chomsky
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