posted
just started reading "On Language", my first foray into his work, and i'm absolutely amazed that i didn't come across him earlier. i don't nessecarily agree with his political ideas, but his work on linguistics and the way he ties it to politics is amazing.
generative grammer is the bomb-diggity!
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posted
I think you mean "da bomb digitty". I'm not really sure what his politics are. Colorless green ideas indeed.
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Chomsky bugs me. I lean as far toward tabula rasa as is feasible, though, so that's no surprise.
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ALR- said linguist is probably just jealous or thinks Chomsky is too extreme. But you can't really get around his ideas entirely in the field. Maybe. I've been out of it for 8 years so who knows.
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Ugh! A thread on Noah Chomsky and they can't spell grammar correctly!
quote:Chomsky bugs me. I lean as far toward tabula rasa as is feasible, though, so that's no surprise.
Two words: Evolutionary psychology. Check out Steven Pinker's thoughts on the subject.
Edit: I took back some liberties I took with Dr. Pinker's name. Don't want to mislead people looking for information. I figured this out after reading Pod's post. Thanks Pod!
The way it works is this: There's MIT, which is optionally refered to as "the Cult of Chomsky", and then theres the rest of the world
Chomsky's ideas were absolutely devistating for behavorism (for which i will admire him forever), however Chomsky eventually did go awry of reality, ironically perpetuating a very dynastic cycle, having come full circle from his place as a graduate upstart over turning decades worth of psychology.
The one thing you can say, one way or the other, is that what Chomsky did changed the way people look at the world, and helped shape the way information is used.
That said, i certainly don't listen or look to chomsky for linguistic theory. Chomsky was the wedge which drove linguistics into the mainstream of social science. However, he can't make up the body of the wedge all by himself. Unfortunately his staunchest allies don't make many consessions for others. Anyway, yes, read Pinker's books, they're good. That or just take some linguistic classes if you can. Language shapes one of the ways we interact with the world, learning about it can do nothing but help you realize the nature of yourself and all your other species-mates.
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it's odd, this is an area which seems to intersect 4 or 5 disciplines, from philosophy to psychology to sociology to AI and on and on.
everything seems to sort of hinge on some very basic issues of perception, abstraction, and information processing at some level.
i came to him from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology and neuroscience (artificial intelligence research basically) so my interest in him is the result of a very strong correlation between his ideas and some that i've been working on.
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quote:Chomsky is to linguistics as Freud is to psychology.
That's exactly what I was thinking. And I took enough psych in college to know that the comparison isn't exactly flattering. Posts: 2220 | Registered: Jun 1999
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being, as i said, a newcomer to linguistic theory, i'm curious as to where chomsky is considered off-base.
with freud (and this is a general comment based on discussions rather than in-depth knowledge) it seems that he is considered misguided in his conclusions because of the cultural bias with which his research was conducted. where does chomsky go wrong?
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Yeah, well since you know something about cognitive psychology, i'll let you in on the full deal, i'm actually something along the lines of a computational psycho-linguist. If you know any mathmatical psychology, or computational modeling currently, i'm a artifical neural network geek for one, but i'm also learning about automatic speech recognition systems, and just interested in how the brain processes information in general.
Anyway, yes, linguistics is rather interrelated to psychology, computer science, sociology, philosophy, speech & hearing sciences, and communicates with all sorts of fields from engineering to physics.
So yeah, people really don't understand how useful linguistics is, and its sort of disturbing.
Onto Chomsky.
Chomsky's basic problem is that he sort of had something to say about everything in linguistics, and while a good deal of what he had to say made sense at the beginning, when people started learning the details about how humans actually use language, it turns out that most of what chomsky had to say either requires some heavy duty theoretical baggage, or becomes untenable when those ugly things called facts crop up.
So, in the beginning, there were these things called context free grammars (incidently CFGs are what underly programming languages). Having soundly trounced Skinner's behaviorist account of natural language, chomsky pointed out that the systematic qualities of syntax could be explained by rewrite rules. So chomsky (i'm not sure if he really developed the whole thing) started promoting context free grammars, and several interesting normal forms there-of.
So then chomsky started trying to account for other things using CFGs, like phonological change in language (thats how sounds are used in a language, [e.g. phonemic stuff, for an example hold up a tissue or napkin loosely in front of your mouth and say "spit" and then "pit", you'll notice that the p in pit is aspirated, while the p in spit is not, english has 2 versions of p, and barely anybody is aware of it]). This works for a while, but then those darned facts crop up again, and you can notice that the whole re-write feature based phonology totally falls apart when concidering Tone languages (like Zulu or Chinese).
Chomsky's syntax is called Government Binding Theory. It's all about heirarchical tree structures, and nested phrases and such. It however has really waned in its popularity, and of the 4 or 5 syntactic theories probably is not one of the most utilized ones currently (at least from what i gather). A boyfriend of a friend of mine likes to refer to GB (or P&P as its now called, for Principles and Parameters) as calvinball, because of how ad hoc he (and others i've talked to) the theory is.
In conclusion, Chomsky is indeed ridiculed for more than just his political philosophy (which i'm agnostic on), because taking a biased line on... well everything, doesn't make you terribly popular.
But, i dunno, i don't know the guy, and i certainly admire alot of what he's done.
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