Linguistic Contributions - Past, Present, and Future
3 lectures by Chomsky
Past
19th and 20the centuries have had linguistics, philosophy, and psychology go their separate ways, the problem of the mind has served to link the disparate fields back together
Karl Lashley, 1948 - argued that underlying language use - and all organized behavior - must contain abstract mechanisms of some sort that are not analyzable in terms of association and could not be developed by simple means
Points that mental structures are not “more of the same”, but rather they are quality very different than the complex networks and structures that can be developed by scaling up
not just degree of complexity, but the quality of complexity
Physics to Cartesian and Newton was not adequately grounded, since it still postulated the mystical force of gravity, just as Descartes’ postulation of the mind
Spanish physicians Juan Harte - Late 16th century, published about intelligence, which gives 3 levels: sensory, self-sustaining, and generative
this is the groundwork for the physchological theory that the use of language is a correct index of intelligence
Descartes observed that even low level languages is totally unattainable by apes
However, this asks us, is reasoning generative of speech? Corvids, for example, can reason without speech
“Being unbounded and freed from stimulus control do not necessarily exceed the bounds of mechanical explanation"
Chomsky begins to formulate the idea of computationally enumerable vs computationally finite
“It seems to be that the most hopeful approach of today is to describle the phenomena of language and of mental activity as accurately as possible” - pg 12
argues that we must stop attempting to link postulates with approaches, and read the behaviors for what they are
Wilhelm von Humbolt - 1830’s - “the speaker makes infinite use of finite means”
Chomsky therefore says that the grammar must contain a finite system of rules that generates infinitely many deep and surface structures
talks about Port-Royal theory to modern structural and descriptive linguistics
latter restricts itself to the analysis of “surface structure” - formal properties that are explicit in the signal and to phrases and units that can be determined from the signal by techniques of segmentation and classification
Ferdinand de Saussure, at the turn of the century, stated that the only methods of linguistic analysis are segmentation and classification
syntagmatic (patterns in the literally succession in the stream of speech)
paradignmatic (relations among units that occupy the same position in the stream of speech)
