Chomsky - Language and Mind

books, chomsky

Linguistic Contributions - Past, Present, and Future

• 3 lectures by Chomsky

Past

• 19th and 20the centuries have had linguistics, philosophy, and psychology go their separate ways, the problem of the mind has served to link the disparate fields back together
• Karl Lashley, 1948 - argued that underlying language use - and all organized behavior - must contain abstract mechanisms of some sort that are not analyzable in terms of association and could not be developed by simple means
• Points that mental structures are not “more of the same”, but rather they are quality very different than the complex networks and structures that can be developed by scaling up
  • not just degree of complexity, but the quality of complexity
• Physics to Cartesian and Newton was not adequately grounded, since it still postulated the mystical force of gravity, just as Descartes’ postulation of the mind
• Spanish physicians Juan Harte - Late 16th century, published about intelligence, which gives 3 levels: sensory, self-sustaining, and generative
  • this is the groundwork for the physchological theory that the use of language is a correct index of intelligence
• Descartes observed that even low level languages is totally unattainable by apes
• However, this asks us, is reasoning generative of speech? Corvids, for example, can reason without speech
• “Being unbounded and freed from stimulus control do not necessarily exceed the bounds of mechanical explanation"
  • Chomsky begins to formulate the idea of computationally enumerable vs computationally finite
• “It seems to be that the most hopeful approach of today is to describle the phenomena of language and of mental activity as accurately as possible” - pg 12
  • argues that we must stop attempting to link postulates with approaches, and read the behaviors for what they are
• Wilhelm von Humbolt - 1830’s - “the speaker makes infinite use of finite means”
  • Chomsky therefore says that the grammar must contain a finite system of rules that generates infinitely many deep and surface structures
• talks about Port-Royal theory to modern structural and descriptive linguistics
  • latter restricts itself to the analysis of “surface structure” - formal properties that are explicit in the signal and to phrases and units that can be determined from the signal by techniques of segmentation and classification
  • Ferdinand de Saussure, at the turn of the century, stated that the only methods of linguistic analysis are segmentation and classification
  • syntagmatic (patterns in the literally succession in the stream of speech)
  • paradignmatic (relations among units that occupy the same position in the stream of speech)