X Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2018
ENGLISH GRAMMARIAN: NOAM CHOMSKY
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Chomsky is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.
Ideologically identifying with anarchism and libertarian socialism, Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy and contemporary capitalism, and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.
According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source. Chomsky is the author of over 100 books.
An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky attracted widespread public attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon's Enemies List. 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 co-wrote an analysis articulating the propaganda model of media criticism, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Additionally, his defense of unconditional freedom of speech – including for Holocaust deniers – generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the early 1980s. Following his retirement from active teaching, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the War on Terror and supporting the Occupy movement.
One of the most cited scholars in history, Chomsky has influenced a broad array of academic fields. He is widely recognized as a paradigm shifter who helped spark a major revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. In addition to his continued scholarly research, he remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, neoliberalism and contemporary state capitalism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mainstream news media. His ideas have proved highly significant within the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements, but have also drawn criticism, with some accusing Chomsky of anti-Americanism.
Born into a middle-class Jewish family. His father was William "Zev" Chomsky, an Ashkenazi Jew originally from Ukraine who had fled to the United States in 1913. Having studied at Johns Hopkins University, William went on to become school principal of the Congregation Mikveh Israel religious school, and in 1924 was appointed to the faculty at Gratz College in Philadelphia. Chomsky's mother was the Belarusian-born Elsie Simonofsky (1904–1972), a teacher and activist whom William had met while working at Mikveh Israel.
Noam was the Chomsky family's first child. His younger brother, David Eli Chomsky, was born five years later. The brothers were close, although David was more easygoing while Noam could be very competitive. Chomsky and his brother were raised Jewish, being taught Hebrew and regularly discussing the political theories of Zionism; the family was particularly influenced by the Left Zionist writings of Ahad Ha'am. As a Jew, Chomsky faced anti-semitism as a child, particularly from the Irish and German communities living in Philadelphia.
He describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish ghetto", split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side", with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature", though he means more a "cultural ghetto than a physical one". Chomsky also describes tensions he experienced with Irish Catholics and German Catholics and anti-semitism in the mid-1930s. He recalls "beer parties" celebrating the fall of Paris to the Nazis. In a discussion of the irony of his staying in the 1980s in a Jesuit House in Central America, Chomsky explained that during his childhood, "We were the only Jewish family around. I grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics. They're the people who beat you up on your way to school. So I knew when they came out of that building down the street, which was the Jesuit school, they were raving anti-Semites. So childhood memories took a long time to overcome."
Chomsky described his parents as "normal Roosevelt Democrats" who had a center-left position on the political spectrum; however, he was exposed to far-left politics through other members of the family, a number of whom were socialists involved in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. He was substantially influenced by his uncle who owned a newspaper stand in New York City, where Jewish leftists came to debate the issues of the day. Whenever visiting his uncle, Chomsky frequented left-wing and anarchist bookstores in the city, voraciously reading political literature. He later described his discovery of anarchism as "a lucky accident", because it allowed him to become critical of other far-left ideologies, namely Stalinism and other forms of Marxism–Leninism.
Chomsky's primary education was at Oak Lane Country Day School, an independent Deweyite institution that focused on allowing its pupils to pursue their own interests in a non-competitive atmosphere. It was here, at the age of 10, that he wrote his first article, on the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona to Francisco Franco's fascist army in the Spanish Civil War. At the age of 12, Chomsky moved on to secondary education at Central High School, where he joined various clubs and societies and excelled academically, but was troubled by the hierarchical and regimented method of teaching used there. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.
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.
A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a mathematical analysis of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in the set of sentences). Chomsky referred to the morphophonemic rules in his 1951 master's thesis—The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew—as transformations in the sense of Carnap's 1938 notion of rules of transformation (vs. rules of formation), and subsequently reinterpreted the notion of grammatical transformations in a very different way from Harris, as operations on the productions of a context-free grammar (derived from Post production systems). Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky. Chomsky earned a BA in 1949 and an MA in 1951.
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.
Harris ignored Chomsky’s work, and Goodman—when he realized that Chomsky would not accept his behaviourism—denounced it. Their reactions, with some variations, were shared by a large majority of linguists, philosophers, and psychologists. Although some linguists and psychologists eventually came to accept Chomsky’s basic assumptions regarding language and the mind, most philosophers continued to resist them.
Chomsky received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 after submitting one chapter of LSLT as a doctoral dissertation (Transformational Analysis). In 1956 he was appointed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to a teaching position that required him to spend half his time on a machine translation project, though he was openly skeptical of its prospects for success (he told the director of the translation laboratory that the project was of “no intellectual interest and was also pointless”). Impressed with his book Syntactic Structures (1957), a revised version of a series of lectures he gave to MIT undergraduates, the university asked Chomsky and his colleague Morris Halle to establish a new graduate program in linguistics, which soon attracted several outstanding scholars, including Robert Lees, Jerry Fodor, Jerold Katz, and Paul Postal.
Chomsky’s 1959 review of Verbal Behavior, by B.F. Skinner, the dean of American behaviourism, came to be regarded as the definitive refutation of behaviourist accounts of language learning. Starting in the mid-1960s, with the publication of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and Cartesian Linguistics (1966), Chomsky’s approach to the study of language and mind gained wider acceptance within linguistics, though there were many theoretical variations within the paradigm. Chomsky was appointed full professor at MIT in 1961, Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics in 1966, and Institute Professor in 1976. He retired as professor emeritus in 2002.
“Plato’s problem”
A fundamental insight of philosophical rationalism is that human creativity crucially depends on an innate system of concept generation and combination. According to Chomsky, children display “ordinary” creativity—appropriate and innovative use of complexes of concepts—from virtually their first words. With language, they bring to bear thousands of rich and articulate concepts when they play, invent, and speak to and understand each other. They seem to know much more than they have been taught—or even could be taught. Such knowledge, therefore, must be innate in some sense. To say it is innate, however, is not to say that the child is conscious of it or even that it exists, fully formed, at birth. It is only to say that it is produced by the child’s system of concept generation and combination, in accordance with the system’s courses of biological and physical development, upon their exposure to certain kinds of environmental input.
It has frequently been observed that children acquire both concepts and language with amazing facility and speed, despite the paucity or even absence of meaningful evidence and instruction in their early years. The inference to the conclusion that much of what they acquire must be innate is known as the argument from the “poverty of the stimulus.” Specifying precisely what children acquire and how they acquire it are aspects of what Chomsky called in LSLT the “fundamental problem” of linguistics. In later work he referred to this as “Plato’s problem,” a reference to Plato’s attempt (in his dialogue the Meno) to explain how it is possible for an uneducated child to solve geometrical problems with appropriate prompting but without any specific training or background in mathematics. Unlike Plato, however, Chomsky held that solving Plato’s problem is a task for natural science, specifically cognitive science and linguistics.
Principles and parameters
Chomsky’s early attempts to solve the linguistic version of Plato’s problem were presented in the “standard theory” of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and the subsequent “extended standard theory,” which was developed and revised through the late 1970s. These theories proposed that the mind of the human infant is endowed with a “format” of a possible grammar (a theory of linguistic data), a method of constructing grammars based on the linguistic data to which the child is exposed, and a device that evaluates the relative simplicity of constructed grammars. The child’s mind constructs a number of possible grammars that are consistent with the linguistic data and then selects the grammar with the fewest rules or primitives. Although ingenious, this approach was cumbersome in comparison with later theories, in part because it was not clear exactly what procedures would have to be involved in the construction and evaluation of grammars.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s Chomsky and others developed a better solution using a theoretical framework known as “principles and parameters” (P&P), which Chomksy introduced in Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) and elaborated in Knowledge of Language (1986). Principles are linguistic universals, or structural features that are common to all natural languages; hence, they are part of the child’s native endowment. Parameters, also native (though not necessarily specific to language, perhaps figuring elsewhere too), are options that allow for variation in linguistic structure. The P&P approach assumed that these options are readily set upon the child’s exposure to a minimal amount of linguistic data, a hypothesis that has been supported by empirical evidence. One proposed principle, for example, is that phrase structure must consist of a head, such as a noun or a verb, and a complement, which can be a phrase of any form. The order of head and complement, however, is not fixed: languages may have a head-initial structure, as in the English verb phrase (VP) “wash the clothes,” or a “head-final” structure, as in the corresponding Japanese VP “the clothes wash.” Thus, one parameter that is set through the child’s exposure to linguistic data is “head-initial/head-final.” The setting of what was thought, during the early development of P&P, to be a small number of parametric options within the constraints provided by a sufficiently rich set of linguistic principles would, according to this approach, yield a grammar of the specific language to which the child is exposed. Later the introduction of “microparameters” and certain nonlinguistic constraints on development complicated this simple story, but the basic P&P approach remained in place, offering what appears to be the best solution to Plato’s problem yet proposed.
The phonological, or sound-yielding, features of languages are also parameterized, according to the P&P approach. They are usually set early in development—apparently within a few days—and they must be set before the child becomes too old if he is to be able to pronounce the language without an accent. This time limit on phonological parameter setting would explain why second-language learners rarely, if ever, sound like native speakers. In contrast, young children exposed to any number of additional languages before the time limit is reached have no trouble producing the relevant sounds.
In contrast to the syntactic and phonological features of language, the basic features out of which lexically expressed concepts (and larger units of linguistic meaning) are constructed do not appear to be parameterized: different natural languages seem to rely on the same set. Even if semantic features were parameterized, however, a set of features detailed enough to provide (in principle) for hundreds of thousands of root, or basic, concepts would have to be a part of the child’s innate, specifically linguistic endowment—what Chomsky calls Universal Grammar, or UG—or of his nonlinguistic endowment—the innate controls on growth, development, and the final states of other systems in the mind or brain. This is indicated, as noted above, by the extraordinary rate at which children acquire lexical concepts (about one per waking hour between the ages of two and eight) and the rich knowledge that each concept and its verbal, nominal, adverbial, and other variants provide. No training or conscious intervention plays a role; lexical acquisition seems to be as automatic as parameter setting.
Of course, people differ in the words contained in their vocabularies and in the particular sounds they happen to associate with different concepts. Early in the 20th century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted that there is nothing natural or necessary about the specific sounds with which a concept may be associated in a given language. According to Chomsky, this “Saussurean arbitrariness” is of no interest to the natural scientist of language, because sound-concept associations in this sense are not a part of UG or of other nonlinguistic systems that contribute to concept (and sound) development.
A developed theory of UG and of relevant nonlinguistic systems would in principle account for all possible linguistic sounds and all possible lexical concepts and linguistic meanings, for it would contain all possible phonological and semantic features and all the rules and constraints for combining phonological and semantic features into words and for combining words into a potentially infinite number of phrases and sentences. Of course, such a complete theory may never be fully achieved, but in this respect linguistics is no worse off than physics, chemistry, or any other science. They too are incomplete.
It is important to notice that the semantic features that constitute lexical concepts, and the rules and constraints governing their combination, seem to be virtually designed for use by human beings—i.e., designed to serve human interests and to solve human problems. For example, concepts such as “give” and “village” have features that reflect human actions and interests: transfer of ownership (and much more) is part of the meaning of give, and polity (both abstract and concrete) is part of the meaning of village. Linguists and philosophers sympathetic to empiricism will object that these features are created when a community “invents” a language to do the jobs it needs to do—no wonder, then, that linguistic meanings reflect human interests and problems. The rationalist, in contrast, argues that humans could not even conceive of these interests and problems unless the necessary conceptual machinery were available beforehand. In Chomsky’s view, the speed and facility with which children learn “give” and “village” and many thousands of other concepts show that the empiricist approach is incorrect—though it may be correct in the case of scientific concepts, such as “muon,” which apparently are not innate and do not reflect human concerns.
The overall architecture of the language faculty also helps to explain how conceptual and linguistic creativity is possible. In the P&P framework in its later “minimalist” forms (see below Rule systems in Chomskyan theories of language), the language faculty has “interfaces” that allow it to communicate with other parts of the mind. The information it provides through “sensorimotor” interfaces enables humans to produce and perceive speech and sign language, and the information it provides through “conceptual-intentional” interfaces enables humans to perform numerous cognitive tasks, ranging from categorization (“that’s a lynx”) to understanding and producing stories and poetry.
Generative grammar
The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages. The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed universal grammar. From Chomsky's perspective, the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages in so little time. Furthermore, he argues that there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain (the "poverty of the stimulus" argument). The knowledge of Universal Grammar would serve to bridge that gap.
Chomsky's theories have been immensely influential within linguistics, but they have also received criticism. One recurring criticism of the Chomskyan variety of generative grammar is that it is Anglocentric and Eurocentric, and that often linguists working in this tradition have a tendency to base claims about Universal Grammar on a very small sample of languages, sometimes just one. Initially, the Eurocentrism was exhibited in an overemphasis on the study of English. However, hundreds of different languages have now received at least some attention within Chomskyan linguistic analyses. In spite of the diversity of languages that have been characterized by UG derivations, critics continue to argue that the formalisms within Chomskyan linguistics are Anglocentric and misrepresent the properties of languages that are different from English. Thus, Chomsky's approach has been criticized as a form of linguistic imperialism. In addition, Chomskyan linguists rely heavily on the intuitions of native speakers regarding which sentences of their languages are well-formed. This practice has been criticized on general methodological grounds. Some psychologists and psycholinguists, though sympathetic to Chomsky's overall program, have argued that Chomskyan linguists pay insufficient attention to experimental data from language processing, with the consequence that their theories are not psychologically plausible. Other critics (see language learning) have questioned whether it is necessary to posit Universal Grammar to explain child language acquisition, arguing that domain-general learning mechanisms are sufficient.
Today there are many different branches of generative grammar; one can view grammatical frameworks such as head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar and combinatory categorial grammar as broadly Chomskyan and generative in orientation, but with significant differences in execution.
Chomsky hierarchy.
Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory). Indeed, there is an equivalence between the Chomsky language hierarchy and the different kinds of automata. Thus theorems about languages are often dealt with as either languages (grammars) or automata.
An alternate method of dealing with languages is based upon Formal Power series. Formal Power series as well as the relationship between languages and semi-groups continued to occupy M. P. Schützenberger at the Sorbonne. Formal Power Series are similar to the Taylor Series one encounters in a course on Calculus, and is especially useful for languages where words (terminal symbols) are commutative.
Contributions to psychology.
Chomsky's work in linguistics has had profound implications for modern psychology. For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how children learn language and what, exactly, the ability to use language is.
In 1959, Chomsky published an influential critique of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, a book in which Skinner offered a theoretical account of language in functional, behavioral terms. He defined "Verbal Behavior" as learned behavior that has characteristic consequences delivered through the learned behavior of others. This makes for a view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach focused on the circumstances in which language was used; for example, asking for water was functionally a different response than labeling something as water, responding to someone asking for water, etc. These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted both with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach. Chomsky thought that a functionalist explanation restricting itself to questions of communicative performance ignored important questions. (Chomsky—Language and Mind, 1968). He focused on questions concerning the operation and development of innate structures for syntax capable of creatively organizing, cohering, adapting and combining words and phrases into intelligible utterances.
In the review Chomsky emphasized that the scientific application of behavioral principles from animal research is severely lacking in explanatory adequacy and is furthermore particularly superficial as an account of human verbal behavior because a theory restricting itself to external conditions, to "what is learned," cannot adequately account for generative grammar. Chomsky raised the examples of rapid language acquisition of children, including their quickly developing ability to form grammatical sentences, and the universally creative language use of competent native speakers to highlight the ways in which Skinner's view exemplified under-determination of theory by evidence. He argued that to understand human verbal behavior such as the creative aspects of language use and language development, one must first postulate a genetic linguistic endowment. The assumption that important aspects of language are the product of universal innate ability runs counter to Skinner's radical behaviorism.
Chomsky's 1959 review has drawn fire from a number of critics, the most famous criticism being that of Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1970 paper On Chomsky’s Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, volume 13, pages 83–99). MacCorquodale's argument was updated and expanded in important respects by Nathan Stemmer in a 1990 paper, Skinner's Verbal Behavior, Chomsky's review, and mentalism (Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, volume 54, pages 307–319). These and similar critiques have raised certain points not generally acknowledged outside of behavioral psychology, such as the claim that Chomsky did not possess an adequate understanding of either behavioral psychology in general, or the differences between Skinner's behaviorism and other varieties. Consequently, it is argued that he made several serious errors. On account of these perceived problems, the critics maintain that the review failed to demonstrate what it has often been cited as doing. As such, it is averred that those most influenced by Chomsky's paper probably either already substantially agreed with Chomsky or never actually read it. The review has been further critiqued for misrepresenting the work of Skinner and others, including by quoting out of context. Chomsky has maintained that the review was directed at the way Skinner's variant of behavioral psychology "was being used in Quinean empiricism and naturalization of philosophy."
It has been claimed that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the "cognitive revolution", the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive. In his 1966 Cartesian Linguistics and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.
There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive", or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. Second, he argued that most of the important properties of language and mind are innate. The acquisition and development of a language is a result of the unfolding of innate propensities triggered by the experiential input of the external environment. The link between human innate aptitude to language and heredity has been at the core of the debate opposing Noam Chomsky to Jean Piaget at the Abbaye de Royaumont in 1975 (Language and Learning. The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, Harvard University Press, 1980). Although links between the genetic setup of humans and aptitude to language have been suggested at that time and in later discussions, we are still far from understanding the genetic bases of human language. Work derived from the model of selective stabilization of synapses set up by Jean-Pierre Changeux, Philippe Courrège and Antoine Danchin, and more recently developed experimentally and theoretically by Jacques Mehler and Stanislas Dehaene in particular in the domain of numerical cognition lend support to the Chomskyan "nativism". It does not, however, provide clues about the type of rules that would organize neuronal connections to permit language competence. Subsequent psychologists have extended this general "nativist" thesis beyond language. Lastly, Chomsky made the concept of "modularity" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions).