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John Maher

Introducing Chomsky

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  • Yohanahas quoted4 years ago
    Chomsky is interested in the question: to what extent and in what ways can inquiry in the “Galilean style” yield understanding of the roots of human nature in the cognitive domain?
  • Yohanahas quoted4 years ago
    There’s a view that a language is a set of grammatical expressions. That makes no sense at all, yet it’s a very common view
    Another view is that language is some kind of socio-political phenomenon. It’s like the notion “region”. The world isn’t divided into regions, but we use the notion all the time because it’s useful.
  • Yohanahas quoted4 years ago
    E-Language and I-Language

    Chomsky originally developed the notion of competence, which is the system of knowledge that a native speaker possesses. This cognitive system or domain is reformulated, rather differently, as I-language: a state of the mind-brain. I-language is what a child acquires when it learns language: an instantiation of the initial state. It is highly abstract, remote from ordinary behaviour and mechanisms. By contrast, E-language means external, extensional, any concept of language that is not internal to the mind-brain. So, if one refers to “Irish” as the language they talk where it is dotted orange on a map of Ireland, that’s a case of E-language. It bears conceptual resemblance but no special relation to the earlier term performance – how language is actually used. E-language relates neither to competence nor performance, which are about organisms, nor to complicated socio-political constructs.
  • Yohanahas quoted4 years ago
    Another important defining characteristic of language is structure dependence. This is a universal principle common to the syntax of all languages. Knowing a language is to know not a mere string or linear sequence of words but their structural relationship. The child unerringly uses computationally complex rules involving structure dependence to distinguish between: “Is the girl who has freckles Rosie?” and “Has the girl who freckles is Rosie?”
  • Yohanahas quoted4 years ago
    To say that language is a biological attribute is to say that some of its deepest properties are genetically determined, like many other aspects of who and what we are.
  • Некто Никтоhas quoted4 years ago
    The task of linguistics is to provide deep account of human language.
  • Наталья Юрченкоhas quoted5 years ago
    Perhaps literature will forever give far deeper insight into “the full human person” than any model of scientific inquiry can hope to do. Chomsky
  • Наталья Юрченкоhas quoted5 years ago
    LANGUAGE, LIKE THE MOVEMENT OF THE PLANETS AND GRAVITATIONAL CONSTANTS, IS TAKEN FOR GRANTED, PEOPLE HAVE NO INTUITION ABOUT THE RULES OF CLASSICAL PHYSICS.
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