This book introduces the ideas of how language is learned or acquired. I suppose this is a good introduction to Noam Chomsky, I really haven't read any of his other works.

The book is split into five major chapters with most of the focus being on chapter three. This particular chapter covers Plato's Problem, which is the concept that even with our limited experience, we all have a great deal of creativity with language. We form new sentences and other ideas as easily as we breathe.

At the end of each chapter is a section that covers the little notes made in the chapter. So for instance, if I have a word or phrase that is numbered '7' say, that note would be at the end of the chapter rather than on the page it is noted. ( )

One thing I'll give Dr. Chomsky: combative as he is, he knows how to reach out to the opposition--the linguistic opposition, I mean, not the political opposition, because seriously, fuck those people. He reaches out by presenting generative grammar (I'll say it) 2.0 in a way calculated to disarm and delight the philologers and sociolinguists--as heir to prestructuralist tradition, to Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of language as groeing in the mind like a fruit, not being acquired in a Skinnerian, analogy/repetition sense. Alongside that, he makes the exact point people uncomfortable with the sum effect of his brilliant theory of UG (in whatever form) on modern linguistics need to hear--that generative grammar, the study of universal rules, where language comes from in the mind and the forms it can and cannot take, is not a philosophy--it's a topic. That there is room for the study of internal and external language alongsideeach other.


And then Chomsky proceeds to ignore his own dictum, because for him I-language is the only interesting area of enquiry and all the stunning variety of human speech (and writing, which apparently doesn't even register for him) is just so much morphology, in the biological sense--or not even that, because he seems to think that it's not only not worth studying, it can be actively misleading.


And I get that he has his own concerns, and can't help but see them as more fundamental, but he's been hoisted by his own petard a little, hasn't he? Like, he was so eager to make linguistics as such a cognitive science, rather than just suggest that there are aspects of language production that are best tackled with brainograms and such, that he wrested his tradition and the people working in it over right past his own work into psych and neurology. Yeah--it IS a matter of brainograms, and where does that leave Chomsky and his inductive rationalism? Fundamental but superseded.


Meanwhile, the sociolinguists keep on working with their data-gathering methods, and the more cross-pollination the better, I say. Noam Chomsky: brilliant; seminal; limited; archaic? ( )