Noam Chomsky

Chomsky, Noam. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.

Summary:

In New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, Noam Chomsky refutes what other scholars and critics say about language and then explains why his conception is correct. Chomsky examines language through a more scientific lens, considering brain functions and contending that language is not just for social but individualist ends. He views language as epistemic and confined in a more traditional logocentric definition. Language is not performative but perhaps more of a biological need, as he explains that children will create language if they are left alone (i.e. without the need for communication) (49).

Response:

The part I found the most interesting to my thinking was the short section about space and location. He talks about London existing as both concrete and abstract (126). This was the first time that I had thought about this possibility before and made me consider how I think about location and space in my everyday life. Later when he talks about pronouns and “dependency of reference,” I think this connects above to when he references “conflicting perspectives” as references can refer to different perspectives, adding in confusion or clarity in context. In this section he also mentions that a space can have a character as well, seems obvious, but I’m not sure how to clarify how Chomsky would prove this. His methods seem more science based, so how would he show that a place/space has an abstract character?

Connections/Questions:

In class Joddy asked, “Is this good enough for the 21st century and other ways of making meaning than as he’s defined language?” I don’t think that it is good enough. My mind first goes to what we’ve read of Langer and art. When I think of my experiences with art even this semester, they seem to express, often in non-discursive ways, ideas and feelings that touch the viewer as language. I could see myself creating a short video without words (text or auditory) that communicates to others (not a major concern for Chomsky), but that also is a way of language creation for just myself. Chomsky’s view does not work with that conception. He probably wouldn’t consider Manovich’s database construction as a way of language either.

Quotations:

“The faculty of language can reasonably be regarded as a “language organ” in the sense in which scientist speak of the visual system, or immune system, or circulatory system, as organs of the body. Understood in this way, an organ is not something that can be removed from the body, leaving the rest intact. It is a subsystem of a more complex structure” (4).

“Currently, the best theory is that the initial state of the language faculty incorporates certain general principles of linage structure, including phonetic and semantic principles, and that the mature state of competence is a generative procedure that assigned structural descriptions to expressions and interacts with the motor and perceptual system an other cognitive systems of the mind/brain to yield semantic and phonetic interpretations of utterances” (60).

“No one asks whether the study of a complex molecule belongs to chemistry or biology, an don one should ask whether the study of linguistic expressions and their properties belongs to linguistics, psychology, or the brain sciences” (140).