NICE BOOK WORTH TO READ

There are countless books in the world, but only a few truly stand out as being worthy of our time and attention. One such book is the one that I would highly recommend. It has a captivating storyline that keeps you on the edge of your seat from the very beginning. The characters are well-developed and relatable, making it easy to become invested in their lives and experiences. The author's writing style is engaging and流畅, making the reading experience a pleasure. Whether you are a fan of fiction or non-fiction, this book has something for everyone. It offers valuable insights into human nature, relationships, and the world around us. So, if you are looking for a great book to read, look no further. This one is definitely worth your time and money.

Three and a half.

Though it is a collection of six separate essays and lectures, these mostly share thematic content.

The insights within, which are a continuation of Chomsky's theoretical ideas about, and search for, Universal Grammar, are both poignant and more technical than what the average reader might require.

Although I find Chomsky's theoretical psychological models fascinating, I tremble at the thought of how underwhelming I would have found one of these lectures in person - they are so detailed, more like conference proceedings than general lectures.

Without having previously introduced myself to the idea of Chomsky's theories, I would have had difficulties grasping the "big picture" of the theories presented herein.

This is a wonderful follow-up to Chomsky's work, but I would not recommend it as a starting point.

It is better suited for those who already have some background knowledge and interest in Chomsky's theories and want to explore them in more depth.

However, for the general reader, it may be a bit too technical and overwhelming.

Overall, it is a valuable addition to the field of linguistics, but its accessibility may be limited.

This book is truly worth reading, especially for the first essay it contains.

In this essay, Chomsky makes a significant observation. He notes that the structure of a sentence undergoes a certain kind of transformative process. This process endows the sentence with a profound and meaningful significance for both the person who utters it and whomever hears the sentence.

After having a brief conversation about some of the implications of this interesting idea, however, he unfortunately descends into pedantry.

It is a pity that what could have been a more engaging and far-reaching exploration turns into a rather dry and overly detailed analysis.

Nonetheless, the initial concept put forward by Chomsky in this first essay still holds great value and provides food for thought for those interested in the study of language and its structures.

Perhaps if he had not delved so deeply into the minutiae and instead focused on the broader implications and applications of his idea, this book could have had an even greater impact.

Nevertheless, it remains a work that is worthy of attention and study, if only for that first essay.

In recent decades, a significant part of the time in linguistics has been dedicated to various aspects of language study.

Linguists have been exploring the evolution of languages, their structures, and how they are used in different contexts.

The study of language acquisition has also gained prominence, with researchers trying to understand how children and adults learn new languages.

Furthermore, the impact of globalization on languages has become a major area of interest.

As the world becomes more interconnected, languages are interacting and influencing each other in new ways.

This has led to the emergence of new language varieties and the spread of certain languages across the globe.

In addition, the role of technology in language has been investigated.

The development of the internet and social media has changed the way people communicate and has given rise to new forms of language use.

Overall, the field of linguistics is constantly evolving, and researchers are making new discoveries and contributions to our understanding of language.

Took me ages to read this article.

It was a long and detailed piece that required my full attention.

At first, I thought it might be a waste of time, but as I delved deeper, I realized its value.

The author presented some really interesting ideas and perspectives that made me think.

It was not an easy read, but the effort was definitely worth it.

I learned a lot from it and it broadened my knowledge on the subject.

Now that I have finished reading, I can say that it was a great experience.

I would recommend this article to anyone who is interested in the topic and is willing to put in the time and effort to understand it.

It may seem challenging at first, but the rewards are well worth it.

So, if you come across an article that takes you ages to read, don't give up.

You might just be in for a pleasant surprise.

**Title: A Critical Analysis of Chomsky's "Language and Mind"**

As an inaugural guest's post, I hope the following content, although perhaps not up to the usual standards of this blog, is not too far off the mark. I am part of the same reading group as N Pepperell and have been invited to write some notes on several texts we've covered. So far, our reading has aimed to provide a concise history of 20th-century linguistics, and we've arrived at Chomsky's "Language and Mind".

I must apologize in advance for what may seem a naive and anachronistic perspective. None of us in the group are trained linguists, and so we've been stumbling through what is无疑 a fragmentary and selected course. I also apologize for the prolixity of this inaugural post.

In the 1968 version of his account of language, Chomsky presents roughly as follows: There are 6 lectures, divided into 2 groups of 3. The first group of 3 was based on lectures delivered at Berkeley in '67, and the second group was delivered to different audiences at different times. The didactic purpose of the book becomes clear as one progresses through it: Chomsky is presenting, to different audiences, in more or less technical detail, 3 distinct ideas.

Firstly, he presents the idea of universal grammar in various guises. Grammar is a set of rules that determine the matching of a given sound to a given meaning. Meanings, according to the universal grammar thesis, belong to a deep semantic structure, sounds belong to a surface phonological structure, and what connects the two are syntactic rules.

Secondly, he presents the related but, in my view, not essential idea that such a system is both required by all human languages and acquired too quickly by human individuals to be accounted for by a range of cultural, social, or environmental stimuli. Instead, using the Poverty of the Stimulus argument commented on elsewhere in this blog, this system must be innate.

Thirdly, the "innateness" thesis connects his view with a broad, important but largely forgotten tradition of rationalism, which has long since been eclipsed by the rise of empiricism in general and behavioralism in particular in the human sciences.

At this stage, I want to comment on one aspect of Chomsky's argument: that semantic deep structures exist prior to their transformation into phonological surface structures. In his account here, it seems that every sentence, even assuming for now that in a normative account, sentences can be taken as meaning "informational statements", must exist in some ready-made semantic form before it can go through a transformational process. However, this account seems to me to miss a key aspect of language production - that most sentences develop in time.

When I make a sentence, I can proceed in several ways. I can start with a logical proposition I wish to convey and then determine the best form for conveyance (moulding some semantic content into phonetic or orthographic form via syntactic transformations, in the Chomskyan way). But this is only one of many ways. I can start with a particular phrase, then proceed with what may seem a logical extension, or I can recant, forget where I was, or simply allow my semantic content to remain unexpressed.

Chomsky's examples always assume that a speaker has considered what they want to say before saying it and remains committed to saying it at least until the saying is done. But of course, there are many examples, both mundane and famous, that run counter to this. It might seem that this sort of criticism echoes that of pragmatists generally and Searle in particular. However, what strikes me is not just that sentences can do things other than make statements of fact but that even when making a statement of fact, I can significantly alter the meaning of the statement at any time during its utterance.

This is trivially true, as I can always proceed as teenagers do when they append “…not!” at the end of a sentence. So the point is that it is empirically contingent for any given well-formed sentence whether its meaning has been determined entirely in advance of its utterance and therefore could have undergone the sorts of sentence-wide syntactic transformations that Chomsky proposes. On the other hand, it seems equally plausible that for some sentences, the syntactic form is prior to the semantic content, as in question-and-answer routines.

This is not to say that at the level of a phrase and for many sentences, there may not be processes at work transforming meaning into sound the way Chomsky describes - indeed, this may even be the normative case. However, it seems to me that there are many other ways sentences can be formed, and these show that a more complex relationship exists between the semantic, syntactic, and phonological parts of a sentence than what Chomsky - circa 1968 - allows.

Quite possibly, later Chomsky or other more recent accounts resolve this problem in some way - if indeed it is a problem. Meanwhile, we are now moving on to "How to do Things with Words".

I picked up this book mostly with the intention of having a quick read.

However, after going through it, I have come to the realization that I might need to read something else in order to gain a better understanding of the subject matter.

The content seemed a bit lacking in-depth explanation, and I found myself craving more details and examples to fully grasp the concepts.

It could be that this particular book is more of a surface-level introduction, and to truly delve into the topic, I would need to explore other related materials.

Perhaps a more comprehensive textbook or a collection of research papers would provide the additional insights I am seeking.

Nonetheless, I am still glad I gave this book a try, as it has piqued my interest and motivated me to further explore the subject.

Overall, it was a decent starting point, but I understand that there is much more to learn and discover.

I approached this essay (or, rather, this short collection of essays) mainly because I desired to read about the theory of Universal Grammar directly from its origin. I was in search of an unabridged version rather than the brief and diluted mentions that one can often find in some textbook on theoretical computer science.

And indeed, I found that.

However, I also discovered something else. I found a clear, resolute, and even-tempered voice grappling against the trendy behaviorism (or “science of meter reading”). In Chomsky’s perspective, this approach abandons any attempt to truly understand and instead focuses solely on describing the data. Chomsky even looks back approvingly on the attempts by Cartesian rationalists to explain language acquisition (something, to say the least, extremely unpopular in his era). Although I won't deny that some of the analyses in this book haven't aged well, Chomsky’s intense dissatisfaction with “the conception that knowledge of language can be accounted for as a system of habits” truly resonates in this day and age. Here, scientists and researchers are overly stimulated by the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data to attempt to look beyond scatter plots and histograms.

Well said, Noam.

This is an extremely interesting essay. The topic it explores has intrigued me ever since my university days.

Regrettably, the science of linguistics, just like every other science, has witnessed remarkable progress in the approximately 28 years since it was initially penned.

As a result, it can almost be regarded as a history book.

The field of linguistics has evolved significantly, with new theories, research methods, and discoveries emerging constantly.

What was once considered cutting-edge knowledge may now seem outdated or incomplete.

However, this does not diminish the value of the original essay.

It still provides valuable insights and perspectives that can contribute to our understanding of the subject.

Moreover, it serves as a reminder of how far the field has come and how much more there is to explore.

By studying the past, we can better appreciate the present and look forward to the future of linguistics.

I've read the very first edition of this book (p. 1968). As a result, I must admit to my ignorance of all the new or modified content in more recent editions. From what I've understood in other reviews, the newest edition includes more than six chapters, with the original three incorporated into a single, opening chapter.

As one would expect from a work of linguistics by Chomsky, this book is extremely insightful and engaging. However, there are a few points that could be further clarified to enhance the publication. The underlined phrases are the parts that deserve further clarification, and all citations refer to the '68 edition.

For example, while investigating the abstract rules of phonological transformation, Chomsky states that a single example may not carry much conviction. But a careful investigation of sound structure shows that there are several examples of this sort. In general, highly abstract underlying structures are related to phonetic representation by a long sequence of rules, similar to how on the syntactic level, abstract deep structures are related to surface structures by a long sequence of grammatical transformations (p. 36).

When refuting Thorpe's characterization of human and animal languages as "propositional," Chomsky argues that the rate of alternation of high and low pitch in songs is a linguistic dimension correlated with the nonlinguistic dimension of the intention to defend a territory. The bid signals its intention to defend a territory by selecting a correlated point along the linguistic dimension of pitch alternation. The linguistic dimension is abstract, but the principle is clear. A communication system of the second type has an indefinitely large range of potential signals, like human language. However, the mechanism and principle are entirely different from those employed by human language to express indefinitely many new thoughts, intentions, feelings, and so on (p. 61).

When discussing Peirce's theory of abduction, Chomsky predicts that as specific realizations such as taxonomic linguistics, behaviorist theory, and the perceptron models, heuristic methods, and "general problem solvers" of the early enthusiasts of "artificial intelligence" are successively rejected on empirical grounds when made precise and on grounds of vacuity when left vague, the dogmatic character of the general empiricist framework and its inadequacy to human and animal intelligence will gradually become more evident (p. 79).

I also think the book could benefit from a more clear definition of how the author envisions the interplay and intricate balance between generative and restrictive rules of transformation, as discussed throughout chapters 2 and 3.

The above issues might have been further explored and clarified in newer editions of the book. If so, I'm eager to follow up on Mr. Chomsky's theses and speculations as they have evolved over recent decades.

Linguistics is an extremely wild and fascinating field.

To be honest, I initially had a rather limited understanding of it.

I didn't know enough to be able to fully comprehend this particular book.

The more I delved into the subject, the more I realized how complex and diverse it is.

There are so many aspects to linguistics, from the study of grammar and syntax to the exploration of different languages and their evolution.

It's a field that constantly surprises and challenges me.

Although I still have a long way to go in terms of fully understanding this book and the subject as a whole, I'm excited to continue learning and expanding my knowledge.

I believe that with more effort and study, I'll be able to gain a deeper appreciation for the wild world of linguistics.

I plucked this book off a shelf at work and decided to read it in the interim before my shift began. It turned out to be a solid piece of writing by Chomsky. He basically covers his overall theory of linguistics, not only as a field of study but also as it relates to human thought. However, some of what he said got pretty muddled and hard to understand in certain places, at least for me. Fortunately, the discussion and conclusion sections after the paper itself were really helpful in parsing through all that complex information. Chomsky really highlights here how young the study of linguistics is and how misplaced a lot of the research going on at that time was. I truly love Noam and his works. They always offer me new perspectives and insights into the fascinating world of language and thought.