Decoding Chomsky
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The Evolution of Language: Towards Gestural Hypotheses DIS/CONTINUITIES TORUŃ STUDIES IN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURE Edited by Mirosława Buchholtz Advisory Board Leszek Berezowski (Wrocław University) Annick Duperray (University of Provence) Dorota Guttfeld (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Grzegorz Koneczniak (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Piotr Skrzypczak (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Jordan Zlatev (Lund University) Vol. 20 DIS/CONTINUITIES Przemysław ywiczy ski / Sławomir Wacewicz TORUŃ STUDIES IN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURE Ż ń Edited by Mirosława Buchholtz Advisory Board Leszek Berezowski (Wrocław University) Annick Duperray (University of Provence) Dorota Guttfeld (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Grzegorz Koneczniak (Nicolaus Copernicus University) The Evolution of Language: Piotr Skrzypczak (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Jordan Zlatev (Lund University) Towards Gestural Hypotheses Vol. 20 Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. The translation, publication and editing of this book was financed by a grant from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland within the programme Uniwersalia 2.1 (ID: 347247, Reg. no. 21H 16 0049 84) as a part of the National Programme for the Development of the Humanities. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Ministry cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. Translators: Marek Placi ski, Monika Boruta Supervision and proofreading: John Kearns Cover illustration: © ńMateusz Pawlik Printed by CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 2193-4207 ISBN 978-3-631-79022-9 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-631-79393-0 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-79394-7 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-79395-4 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b15805 Open Access: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 unported license. -
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Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) MAGIC AND LANGUAGE Or why Bernard Bloch, Noam Chomsky, Allen G-insberg, Zellig Harris, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Bell Telephone, IBM and the us Military Thought it was Sexy / Useful / Exciting to Study Linguist!cs in the 19505. By Robert F. Barsky n 1934 Henry Miller is in search of the magic of exaltation, crying out to they who would listen only after bartles of censorship for his Trapic cf I CapricoYrl : " 'Show me a man who over-elaborates and! will show you a great man!' What is called their 'over-elaboration' is my meat ; it is the sign of struggle, it is struggle itself with ail the fibers clinging to it, the very aura and ambience of the discordant spirit. And when you show me a man who expresses himself perfectly ! will not say that he is not great, but 1 will say that 1 am unattracted." !t's the deformity Miller seeks out both in his own writings, and in those ofhis "old idols," the "chaos and confusion they wallowed in," the "obstacles they heaped up about them," their "confllSion," their "stuttering," their "staggering effort." ! seek not to be human, says he, but to be "inhuman," to "join my slime, my excrement, my madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean faults ofthe flesh." Miller, the Bakhtinian carnival king, "the man who raises the holy bottle to his !ips, the criminal who kneels in the marketplace, the innocent one who discovers that ail corpses stink, the madman who dances with !ightning in his hands, the friar who lifts his skirts to pee over -
Preservice Teachers' Reflections on Language Diversity
Preservice teachers’ reflections on language diversity Toril Rangnes, Andrea Synnøve Blomsø Eikset To cite this version: Toril Rangnes, Andrea Synnøve Blomsø Eikset. Preservice teachers’ reflections on language diver- sity. Eleventh Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education, Utrecht University, Feb 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands. hal-02435368 HAL Id: hal-02435368 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02435368 Submitted on 10 Jan 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Preservice teachers’ reflections on language diversity Toril Eskeland Rangnes and Andrea Synnøve Blomsø Eikset Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Education, Arts and Sports, Norway; [email protected] and [email protected] In this paper, we investigate how preservice teachers (PTs) express their awareness about language diversity in mathematics classrooms. We use “language as resource” and “language as a problem” as theoretical constructs. The data is taken from PTs´ group assignments, including transcriptions of dialogues between the PTs and multilingual students, and from PTs´ written reflections about teaching in multilingual classrooms. We found that in the dialogues, PTs and multilingual students produced meanings together through negotiating a shared repertoire from out-of-school and in-school mathematics context. -
The Distributional Hypothesis∗
The distributional hypothesis∗ Magnus Sahlgren SICS, Box 1263, SE-16429 Kista, Sweden [email protected] 1 Introduction Distributional approaches to meaning acquisition utilize distributional proper- ties of linguistic entities as the building blocks of semantics. In doing so, they rely fundamentally on a set of assumptions about the nature of language and meaning referred to as the distributional hypothesis. This hypothesis is often stated in terms like “words which are similar in meaning occur in similar con- texts” (Rubenstein & Goodenough, 1965); “words with similar meanings will occur with similar neighbors if enough text material is available” (Sch¨utze& Pedersen, 1995); “a representation that captures much of how words are used in natural context will capture much of what we mean by meaning” (Landauer & Dumais, 1997); and “words that occur in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings” (Pantel, 2005), just to quote a few representative examples. The general idea behind the distributional hypothesis seems clear enough: there is a correlation between distributional similarity and meaning similarity, which allows us to utilize the former in order to estimate the latter. However, one can pose two very basic questions concerning the distributional hypothesis. The first is what kind of distributional properties we should look for, and what — if any — the differences are between different kinds of distribu- tional properties. Looking at algorithms for distributional meaning acquisition we can discern two distinct approaches. The first is to build distributional pro- files for words based on which other words surround them, as exemplified by Sch¨utze (1992) and the Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) model (Lund, Burgess, & Atchley, 1995). -
Sapir, Harris and Chomsky in the Twentieth Century William L
VOLUME 7 29 Cognitive Critique SAPIR, HARRIS AND CHOMSKY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WILLIAM L. ABLER Department of Geology The Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois 60605, USA E-MAIL: [email protected] KEYWORDS algebra, Chomsky, discrete, evolution, language, mind, numbers, sentence ABSTRACT The concept of linguistics has isolated language from other natural systems, and linguistics has remained overwhelmingly a descrip- tive, rather than a theoretical science. The idea of language uni- versals has thus been a matter of finding shared properties among the highest levels in the organization of language, rather than an attempt to understand the connections of language to other natural systems at all levels of its organization. Language basics such as discreteness have been treated as axiomatic or refractory. The ori- gin of language has been treated as an exercise in continuity, rather than an attempt to understand the organization of language. These trends have been driven by the personalities of Edward Sapir, Zellig Harris and Noam Chomsky, more than by scientific considerations. Sapir’s eagerness, Harris’s indecision, and Chomsky’s magnetism have generated a perfect scientific storm. 30 SAPIR, HARRIS AND CHOMSKY IN THE 20TH CENTURY INTRODUCTION In the 1960s, the gossip was still current that linguist Edward Sapir (1921), in the 1920s, had promoted the study of his favorite subject as an independent science, in reaction to the meteoric rise of physics that followed the Eddington eclipse expedition of 1919. Whatever his real motivations, it is possible to watch Sapir (1921, p. 58) aban- don the image of speech-sounds as “atoms” (from chemistry) or (1925/1957, p. -
The Chomsky Enigma
Weekly Worker 655 - Thursday January 4 2007 18/08/2010 11:07 Weekly Worker 655 Thursday January 11 2007 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker 18:08:201004:05:2009 The Chomsky home contact enigma action weekly worker respect the unity coalition How is that a powerful critic of US imperialism european social forum has been regarded as a valued asset by the US theory military? In the first of three articles Chris Knight resources of the Radical Anthropology Group begins his what we fight for examination of the life and work of Noam programme Chomsky join Noam Chomsky ranks among the leading intellectual search figures of modern times. He has changed the way we Fighting fund think about what it means to be human, gaining a communist university position in the history of ideas - at least according to On the links his supporters - comparable with that of Galileo, Descartes or Newton. Since launching his intellectual our history assault against the academic orthodoxies of the move 1950s, he has succeeded - almost single-handedly - in revolutionising linguistics and establishing it as a modern science. Our January fund has received an early boost with a handsome Such intellectual victories, however, have come at a £100 donation from comrade GD. cost. The stage was set for the “linguistics wars”1 Which is very handy, as when Chomsky published his first book. He might as circumstances have conspired to well have thrown a bomb. “The extraordinary and force us to change premises - an traumatic impact of the publication of Syntactic expensive business, as readers structures by Noam Chomsky in 1957,” recalls one will know. -
Zellig Harris's Theory of Syntax and Linguistic Reflexivity
Zellig Harris’s theory of syntax and linguistic reflexivity Philippe de Brabanter To cite this version: Philippe de Brabanter. Zellig Harris’s theory of syntax and linguistic reflexivity. Belgian Essays on Language and Literature, 2001, pp.53-66. ijn_00000415 HAL Id: ijn_00000415 https://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/ijn_00000415 Submitted on 4 Nov 2003 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Zellig Harris’s theory of syntax and linguistic reflexivity Though Zellig Harris was originally one of the leading names in the transformational ‗revolution‘ that rocked the linguistic world in the 1950s, his theories did not meet with the same success as Chomsky‘s. In particular, Harris did not attract a large following in the later years of his activity as a linguist. To my knowledge, introductions into Harris‘s personal conception of grammar are few and far between. Hiz (1994) and Matthews (1999), both of which are obituaries, provide a useful overview of his biography and theories. 1 Harris (1988) is the closest one has to an introductory exposition by the linguist himself, but that book already makes for a taxing reading experience. My interest in Harris stems from a concern with the analysis of the metalinguistic dimension of discourse. -
New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind Noam Chomsky Frontmatter More Information
Cambridge University Press 0521651476 - New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind Noam Chomsky Frontmatter More information New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind This book is an outstanding contribution to the philosophical study of language and mind, by one of the most influential thinkers of our time. In a series of penetrating essays, Noam Chomsky cuts through the confusion and prejudice which has infected the study of language and mind, bringing new solutions to traditional philosophical puzzles and fresh perspectives on issues of general interest, ranging from the mind–body problem to the unification of science. Using a range of imaginative and deceptively simple linguistic ana- lyses, Chomsky argues that there is no coherent notion of “language” external to the human mind, and that the study of language should take as its focus the mental construct which constitutes our knowledge of language. Human language is therefore a psychological, ultimately a “biological object,” and should be analysed using the methodology of the natural sciences. His examples and analyses come together in this book to give a unique and compelling perspective on language and the mind. is Institute Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Chomsky has written and lectured extensively on a wide range of topics, including linguistics, philosophy, and intellectual history. His main works on linguistics include: Syntactic Structures; Current Issues in Linguistic Theory; Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; Cartesian Linguistics; Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle); Language and Mind; Reflections on Language; The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory; Lec- tures on Government and Binding; Modular Approaches to the Study of the Mind; Knowledge of Language: its Nature, Origins and Use; Language and Problems of Knowledge; Generative Grammar: its Basis, Development and Prospects; Language in a Psychological Setting; Language and Prob- lems of Knowledge; and The Minimalist Program. -
CHOMSKY, Noam Avram (1928- ) Forthcoming in the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, 1860-1960 Ed., Ernest Lepore, Thoemmes Press, 2004
CHOMSKY, Noam Avram (1928- ) Forthcoming in the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, 1860-1960 ed., Ernest LePore, Thoemmes Press, 2004. Noam Chomsky was born to Dr. William (Zev) Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928. His father emigrated to the United States from Russia. William was an eminent scholar, author of the study Hebrew, the Eternal Language (1957), as well as numerous other works on the history and teaching of Hebrew. Noam entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1945. There he came in contact with Zelig Harris, a prominent linguist and the founder of the first linguistics department in the United States (at the University of Pennsylvania). In 1947 Chomsky decided to major in linguistics, and in 1949 he began his graduate studies in that field. His BA honor’s thesis Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew (1949, revised as an MA thesis in 1951) contains several ideas that foreshadow Chomsky’s later work in generative grammar. In 1949 he married the linguist Carol Schatz. During the years 1951 to 1955 Chomsky was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, where he completed his PhD dissertation entitled Transformational Analysis (1955; published as part of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory in 1975). Chomsky received a faculty position at MIT in 1955 and he has been teaching there ever since. In 1961 he was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics; the graduate program in linguistics began the same year. In 1966 he was appointed Ferrari Ward Professor of Linguistics. In 1976, the linguistics and philosophy programs at MIT were merged and the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy was created; this has been Chomsky’s home department ever since. -
A Short History of Morphological Theory∗
A short History of Morphological Theory∗ Stephen R. Anderson Dept. of Linguistics, Yale University Interest in the nature of language has included attention to the nature and structure of words — what we call Morphology — at least since the studies of the ancient Indian, Greek and Arab grammarians, and so any history of the subject that attempted to cover its entire scope could hardly be a short one. Nonetheless, any history has to start somewhere, and in tracing the views most relevant to the state of morphological theory today, we can usefully start with the views of Saussure. No, not that Saussure, not the generally acknowledged progenitor of modern linguis- tics, Ferdinand de Saussure. Instead, his brother René, a mathematician, who was a major figure in the early twentieth century Esperanto movement (Joseph 2012). Most of his written work was on topics in mathematics and physics, and on Esperanto, but de Saussure (1911) is a short (122 page) book devoted to word structure,1 in which he lays out a view of morphology that anticipates one side of a major theoretical opposition that we will follow below. René de Saussure begins by distinguishing simple words, on the one hand, and com- pounds (e.g., French porte-plume ‘pen-holder’) and derived words (e.g., French violoniste ‘violinist’), on the other. For the purposes of analysis, there are only two sorts of words: root words (e.g. French homme ‘man’) and affixes (e.g., French -iste in violoniste). But “[a]u point de vue logique, il n’y a pas de difference entre un radical et un affixe [. -
Noam Chomsky
“Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.” ― Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes described as "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 over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism. Life and Career • Chomsky is a prolific author whose principal linguistic works after Syntactic Structures include Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964), The Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle, 1968), Language and Mind (1972), Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), and Knowledge of Language (1986). In addition, he has wide-ranging political interests. He was an early and outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and has written extensively on many political issues from a generally left-wing point of view. Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974), Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding (1982) Manufacturing Consent (with E.S. Herman, 1988), Profit over People (1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky’s controversial bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States, which he calls “a leading terrorist state. -
New Perspectives on Language and Thought
In K. Holyoak and R. Morrison, eds. (in press), Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning.2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. New perspectives on language and thought Lila Gleitman University of Pennsylvania and Anna Papafragou University of Delaware ________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT This chapter discusses the question of whether, how, where, and to what extent language plays a causally fundamental role in creating categories of thought, and in organizing and channeling thought that is already mentally present. In general, both logic and currently available evidence suggest a disclamatory view of strongest proposals (e.g., Benjamin Whorf, 1956) according to which particulars of certain human languages are important progenitors of thought, such that elements of perception or conception would be permanently altered by learning one or another language. However, several credible lines of experimental and developmental evidence suggest significant influence of linguistic representation during on-line processing in many cognitive and perceptual domains: Insofar as languages differ in the short-term processing demands that they pose to listeners, interpretational outcomes and styles, including characteristic ambiguity resolution, may look quite different cross- linguistically as a function of concomitant population differences (e.g., age- group) and task demands. Keywords: categorical perception; Whorf; linguistic relativity; linguistic determinism The presence of language is one of the central features that distinguishes humans from other species. Even in very early infancy, during the (misnamed) prelinguistic stage of life, infants respond positively to strangers who are speaking in the special melodies of the exposure language, but shrink away from those speaking a different language or dialect (Kinzler, Shutts, DeJesus & Spelke, 2009).