XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

General information

Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. 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 holds a joint appointment as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and laureate professor at the University of Arizona, and is the author of more than 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media.

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.

Noam Chomsky's contribution to linguistics

Noam Chomsky is known as the father of modern linguistics. Back in 1957, Chomsky, with his revolutionary book “Syntactic Structures,” laid the foundation of his non-empiricist theory of language. Two years later, with his review of B. F. Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior,” he argued that Behaviorism, the dominant approach to language at the time, was no longer to be the way of studying language. While Skinner focused on the language people were observed using, Chomsky was interested in the underlying structure of language. This shift in focus affected not only how we view the structure of language, but how it might be learned as well; while Skinner believed that children learn language by imitating and repeating what they hear, Chomsky hypothesized that language learning went far deeper than that.

Chomsky made the study of language scientific. He demonstrated that despite the observable variety of the world’s languages, there is likely only one inventory of linguistic features. All languages — dead, still used, or even future ones — are combinations of these elements. After Chomsky, linguistics is defined as 'the scientific study of language'— 'language' in the singular.

As Chomsky’s work continued, he posed a novel approach to thinking about language, called the theory of Universal Grammar. This intricate theory includes the idea that humans are genetically endowed with knowledge of the linguistic features of which language is composed and the ability to determine how those features are organized into the language(s) they hear around them.

The basis of Chomsky's linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited. As such he argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences. In adopting this position Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner, who viewed behavior (including talking and thinking) as a completely learned product of the interactions between organisms and their environments. Accordingly, Chomsky argues that language is a unique evolutionary development of the human species and distinguished from modes of communication used by any other animal species. Chomsky's nativist, internalist view of language is consistent with the philosophical school of "rationalism" and contrasts with the anti-nativist, externalist view of language consistent with the philosophical school of "empiricism", which contends that all knowledge, including language, comes from external.

Universal grammar

Since the 1960s Chomsky has maintained that syntactic knowledge is at least partially inborn, implying that children need only learn certain language-specific features of their native languages. He bases his argument on observations about human language acquisition, noting that there is a "poverty of the stimulus"—enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic competence they attain. For example, although children are exposed to only a very small and finite subset of the allowable syntactic variants within their first language, they somehow acquire the highly organized and systematic ability to understand and produce an infinite number of sentences, including ones that have never before been uttered, in that language.

To explain this, Chomsky reasoned that the primary linguistic data must be supplemented by an innate linguistic capacity. Furthermore, while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability.

Chomsky labeled whatever relevant capacity the human has that the cat lacks the language acquisition device, and suggested that one of linguists' tasks should be to determine what that device is and what constraints it imposes on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that result from these constraints would constitute "universal grammar". Multiple scholars have challenged universal grammar on the grounds of the evolutionary infeasibility of its genetic basis for language, the lack of universal characteristics between languages, and the unproven link between innate/universal structures and the structures of specific languages.

Commentary

When we treat language as a science, we can start with general theories that explain why languages are the way they are. Chomsky’s theory, for example, says that there is a universal basis, or faculty, in the mind, innate in every human and dedicated to language, that incorporates the basic features of language. What we all do while learning our mother tongue at a tender age, then, is determine relationships between these features based on the data we get by exposure to an unorganized and random set of utterances via interaction with other speakers. We do not study whether sentences abide by the ‘rules’ of grammar, but whether grammatical and ungrammatical sentences can be explained with the hypotheses we make. I personally find Noam Chomsky’s theory rational. In linguistics, as in the other sciences, we aim at explaining some data and not everything — making small steps at a time. Many steps have been made since 1957, but we still have a long way to go. However, we have a solid path to follow thanks to Noam Chomsky.

References

1.Noam Chomsky. "Tool Module: Chomsky's Universal Grammar" — 2010

2.Northumbria University, Ewa Dąbrowska. "What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it?"

3.Binoy Barman — The Lingustic Philosophy Of Noam Chomsky

4.http://linguistics.mit.edu/user/chomsky/

5.https://chomsky.info — Noam Chomsky Official Website