User:Pinkville/discussions

This page is for ongoing discussions of photography, politics, Chomsky, and anything else that folks would like to discuss in greater depth than is convenient on a talk page. Please add any new topics at the bottom, with an appropriate heading.

Chomsky & language

[transferred from my talk page, with unrelated material removed]

OK, maybe not out-chomskied enough. Here's a citation from the introduction to The Amazonian Languages, eds. Dixon and Aikhenvald. Chomsky has been accused of reducing everything to syntax. Maybe, maybe not, but I myself suspect that the ones who set up the scheme for the work mentioned in the introduction were disciples of his. To give Chomsky the benefit of the doubt, I may wrong or, if I'm right, they may have misunderstood their teacher. But here comes the quotation.

The Handbook of Amazonian Languages, edited by Desmond C. Derbyshire and Geoffrey K. Pullum and published by Mouton de Gruyter, is a most worthwhile enterprise that has so far run to four volumes that include ten grammars (ranging in quality from quite good to very good) together with a number of typological and historical studies. Yet the Handbook would be more useful if the contributors were not forced to follow an idiosyncratic scheme of organization: syntax, then phonology, then morphology. That this is basically unworkable is demonstrated by the fact that five of the eight grammars in the first three volumes have, as the whole of 23, Morphology, a single sentence along the lines This has been treated in earlier sections. It is of course necessary to know the basic inflectional morphology in order to unterstand the syntax, so this information is slipped in early on in the description (but at different places in each grammar). The net result may be that nowhere is there any integrated morphological statement, e.g. of the structure of the verb.

This really sounds peculiar, and if my suspicion is correct, then Chomsky does have something to answer for. (Io)

I don't know the work you've mentioned here, but I know something of Geoffrey Pullum, and it seems clear from what I know of him and of the context, that this is not the same subject within linguistics that Chomsky is pursuing. Traditionally, linguistics has dealt with analysing the differences and similarities of various language, their histories and interactions, etc. That is not Chomsky's subject. Chomsky is interested in the faculty of mind that allows us to acquire and use language, and it is the findings that he and others have uncovered that strongly suggest the existence of a language organ (not a term he uses [anymore], by the way) - the faculty of language that not only largely allows for our communication with each other, but that also allows for (the peculiarities of) human thought. When speaking of language, Chomsky is usually speaking of language in this sense, and not in the sense of English, French, Wolof, Thai, etc. (termed, natural languages). He is interested in the generative grammar that allows all normal humans to produce unprecedented sentences, etc. with limited means. That is, to have the capacity for infinite expression from limited means. More on this later, I suspect... Pinkville (talk) 02:03, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

There is also the question about the oft mentioned language organ and settings of parameters (I once attended a weird and illogical lecture by a devoted follower where that concept figured heavily, perhaps more of which later) along with the question of whether children acquire all languages with equal ease. The first thought that springs to mind is that the children are not able to decide the question. They have forgotten by the time they are able to answer. (Io)

Actually, the fact that children forget this "learning" is one bit of evidence that supports Chomsky's theories of language acquisition. The process seems to be nearly automatic. At this point, nearly every living language has been studied - and in Chomskyan linguistics, the weirder the language, the more likely it has been studied (e.g. Australian Aboriginal languages are at the centre of the field; and studies of sign languages have been pivotal), and the facts are in: children acquire language - regardless of where or which language(s) - in the same time frame and the same way. One of the key observations in Chomsky's analyses of language is that - in spite of the outrageous apparent difficulty of the task - children acquire language with nearly no instruction, and with apparent ease - almost as if they are simply waiting for it to come upon them. For example, though it takes years of intensive training to get a chimpanzee to acquire a few word, a human child acquires about 35 words per day from the age of 3 (until their teens, when the rate slows, slightly) - and without having to hear the various tense/person/etc. variations of each word. That is the "ease" of language acquisition of which Chomsky speaks. To contrast, the (now debunked) Behaviourist account of language acquisition was that children had to hear (and remember) every utterance that they might some day use... without any scope for simply knowing the grammar and creating their own utterances as circumstances demanded. Pinkville (talk) 02:25, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Just a single point (or perhaps a couple) in the midst of everything else, so that you don't think I've deserted you. :-) That children don't remember how they learned their language is neither here nor there. In the process of learning, they are not able to communicate, and what cannot be somehow kept in mind by some kind of system, call it a mental sign language or whatever you wish, can not be remembered. A terms like "now debunked" should not be bandied about. It (behaviourism) has been debunked to the satisfaction of those who were mostly against it in the first place or let themselves be swayed by Chomsky's skills at sweeping under the carpet. There is a world of qualified people out there who disagree. The late, lamented Larry Trask was one of them, one of the regrettably few linguists, who are cited in opposition to Chomsky in that particular article. The rest of the criticism is regrettably about politics and Chomskys apparent need to draw attention to himself in one field, when his attraction in another was on the wane. There is no such thing as a weird language except in the eye of the beholder. If you think English is somehow typical, then most languages look weird, but had Chomsky been born Turkish, his theory would have been different. Cross-species comparisons are also absolutely irrelevant. Sorry about this plain talk, but it's been a tiring day, and tomorrow will be worse. I'll pick up more substantial points (if you were about to tell me, that I'm merely speculatiog, I am aware of that :-) when I'm fresh. But still, Chomsky isn't in a position to say much of anything about the function of the mind, precisely because of his abstract approach. As a phycisist once said (according to my memory): "High-energy particle interactions don't take place in Hilbert spaces, they take place in a laboratory." The same can be said about language. All the best and hope to hear from you Io (talk) 19:11, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

One belated PS. As anyone who has learned a foreign language can attest, 35 new words per day are nothing astonishing, especially if a major proportion of your waking hours are devoted to the task. Children do have something to compare to, namely the rules they have already learnt, hence the frequency of errors based on analogy in their language. The first rules are learnt slowly, then at an accelerating pace, but that doesnt't have to mean that the rules are innate and in my opinion they are not. Use Occam's razor. The poverty of stimulus is vastly overrated. Don't parents talk to their children? I don't know of a single case, when they have not. In fact parents are usually talking all the time, when they are with their children. Cheers (and I will add comments as I think of them and find the time) :-) Io (talk) 20:53, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

This has been a long one. I'll keep the next one, if there is one, shorter. Feel free to answer, if you're so inclined, on my talk page. That frees your own from clutter and I will see the answer sooner. All the best Io (talk) 18:05, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

But no one now subscribes to the (behaviourist) notion of language acquisition that Skinner proposed, even though its supporters were many when Chomsky countered Skinner (in the 1950s). In that light, "debunked" seems perfectly reasonable. It's not a question of depending on "those who were mostly against it [behaviourism] in the first place", rather, that whatever concepts it proposed that were supported by evidence have been accepted (and so we have behaviourist therapy to counter smoking, etc.), while the bulk has been (rightly) discarded as lacking any evidence, testability, coherence, or logic. Chomsky was one agent in the process of holding behaviourism's proposals to scientific accountability. Was Larry Trask a behaviourist? News to me.

There is no "apparent need for Chomsky to draw attention to himself" in linguistics or any other field. Reading his works, one is struck by his genuine efforts to reduce the tendency to overstate his contributions, in spite of their overt significance. I don't understand what you mean about his attraction in one field being in the wane...

I placed "weirder" in italics precisely to indicate that I was using ironic short hand... Of course, neither I nor Chomsky would consider any one language more "typical" than any other. But I should simply have said that such languages as those of Aboriginal Australia that possess features that are apparently unlike those of most/any other languages have been all the more rigorously studied. The same is true of Kanien'keha, the Mohawk language, for example.

Back to Chomsky, you refer to his abstract approach, but Chomsky's work is remarkable precisely for its practical, scientific approach. He repeatedly insists that speculation on matters for which there is no evidence is unwarranted, limiting himself to posing questions that may reasonably be answered (based on what is known), and working towards answering them. This is exactly why he became interested in linguistics, because the field provided the best comparatively known body of evidence with which to study the mind (his fundamental interest).

35 new words (with tense, etc. variations) a day. I find it astonishing that you can compare the tedious, burdensome work (with limited results) of an adult learning another language with the apparently effortless acquisition of words by a young child. Note that children do not merely learn the words themselves - as astounding as that ought to be - but they learn the proper ways of using them, and many other features of appropriateness, etc. - without anyone spending the presumably necessary time to teach them. One example, how is it that a child hearing her mother or father say, I'm looking at you! understands who is doing the looking and who is being looked at? And how is it that the child, turning the question around, understands to refer to herself as "I" and not "you", since "you" is the name to which she is always referred? (Note further, parents always point to themselves, saying "I", then point to the child, saying, "you"). I don't know what you're referring to when you say, "the rules they have already learnt", nor, specifically, what you mean about their "errors". But it's interesting to look at the types of errors that children make, they don't, for instance, make grammatical but nonsensical errors - as one might expect - on the order of Chomsky's famous non-sentence: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. That example alone goes against the gradualist scenario of language acquisition that you propose. The complications of language are much vaster than you assume, and so Occam's razor quite naturally suggests innateness, and not, for example, behaviourist tabula rasa.

I'll respond to your other comments as time permits... Pinkville (talk) 02:29, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

35 new words (with tense, etc. variations) a day. I find it astonishing that you can compare the tedious, burdensome work (with limited results) of an adult learning another language with the apparently effortless acquisition of words by a young child.

Sorry for not having answered sooner, but I've been sick, and still am, so I'll answer the rest later. As for the tedium of learning languages at that rate, I've done it thrice, counting my native language, but not English, which has never really interested me as such (no offence to anyone, I hope). It sounds like bragging, and probably is, but its true, so the tedium depends on more than age. And you seem to have changed your viewpoint - first it was an incredible achievement if I remember correctly, now it is an apparently effortless acquisition of words. I have seen and heard children aquire language and to some degree agree with with you. To answer more clearly, I need more time and a clearer head than I have at the moment. And my argument still stands that it takes children, say 2-5 years, depending on the child, to become fluent in one language, during which they don't have much to do, intellectually, to do much else. Thanks for the answer, and I'll get back to you, when I have regained the abilities of a six year old. :-) Cheers Io (talk) 20:27, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Sorry to hear you've been sick. Hope you're feeling better.

"Apparently" means "visibly", there's no change in viewpoint. It is indeed remarkable that children absorb such a quantity of words without effort or instruction. The effort required by an adult to acquire another language - as I also understand first-hand - is incomparably substantial. Furthermore, children exposed to two or more languages at an early age learn them in the same time-frame, as though they are one language (in parts of Africa, it is common for children to acquire up to twenty, often substantially different, languages, without apparent effort). One must take into account, also, that it is not merely a question of learning the dictionary definitions of words, but also of their conjugations, etc., of where they are placed in a sentence, and most of all, of their deeper properties (in Universal Grammar). For example, there are properties of words/language that we are never aware of that we nevertheless know, such as: when we say, the brown house, we understand that it is the exterior of the house that is brown, not (necessarily) the interior. It turns out that most words and phrases have such underlying properties that are never consciously taken into account (certainly not in dictionaries, where such descriptions would be ludicrous), but that "limit" our use of language. These properties are another aspect of what children know when "learning" language. Pinkville (talk) 23:25, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Just one thing. Where on earth did you hear that it is common in parts of Africa (which parts?) that people there learn 20 languages without apparent effort? That has to be some strange family structure, if children are exposed to 20 languages simultaniously. In short, I believe you have either misunderstood something or someone wanted to bolster a claim with something outrageous. (Apart from that, it is true that multilingualism is common among Africans and others as well.) Io (talk) 00:20, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

PS Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. That sentence alone tells me nothing other than when a child utters it or something comparable, its parents look at it curiously and ask it, what it was supposed to mean, at which the child rethinks, so to speak, the situation. Nothing mysterious there. And now I'm going back to watching (would you believe it :-) an American television programme. :-) Cheers. Io (talk) 20:38, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

The point of the sentence is that no child utters it (or similar sentences); that it is precisely the kind of error that children do not make, even though it is grammatical. One would expect grammatical but non-sensical errors, if behaviourist and many other "non-Chomskyan" accounts of language acquisition were true. But such is not the case. Pinkville (talk) 23:31, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Still a bad example which does not prove a thing. Have you never heard a child utter grammatically correct nonsense? Cheers Io (talk) 00:20, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

You seem to divide the linguistic world into behaviourists and Chomskyists and not much in between. Larry Trask was not a behaviourist - I did not say so and the article I referred to definitely does not either. I am also not a behaviourist, as far as I know. However I cannot accept a vague postulate about some disembodied organ. If Chomskys interest is the study of the mind he should have taken up medicine, chemistry, biophysics or anything having to do with the actual workings of the brain. It is simply not a subject for linguists except perhaps to meditate about. Chomsky has, from the little I know of his career, regularly altered his standpoind to stay in the limelight, to say nothing about his politics, where he has shown him self to be a master of prevarication. Since you've sent me a couple of pro-chomsky-links, I'll give you this in return: http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomskyhoax.html . Of course, this website is squarely against him, but then again, that much was to be expected and may serve as a healthy counterweight. Reading Chomsky on the Khmer Rouge is instructive, for instance. But to get to Larry Trask again, I mentioned him because he was the first of too few linguists linguists mentioned on Criticism of Noam Chomsky. The main focus of that article is regrettably on politics - regrettably, since he is absolutely no political thinker - bottom 1% seems about right. Cheers Io (talk) 21:19, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

First, Chomsky doesn't use the term language organ (I'm not sure he ever did, except perhaps in inverted commas), he uses the term, language faculty, which, he points out, must have biological components. Such components do not constitute an organ, but, according to the most most recent articles I have seen, comprise parts of the sensory-motor system and the conceptual-intentional system with a "uniquely human" recursive component. Your suggestion that he ignore linguistics in his study of mind, while concentrating on biochemistry, etc. misses the point, since linguistics is the product of mind of which we know the most (albeit, yet only a little). Medicine, chemistry and biophysics can account for certain limited aspects of mind, but their findings must be combined with findings in other fields - particularly linguistics (which, for the moment, sheds the most light) - to begin to pose even the right questions. Chomsky actually works with researchers in such "hard sciences" to further his understanding of his subject. In the same way that scientists examine what and how people see to try to understand the faculty of vision, Chomsky is examining what people say to understand the faculty of language. Language is (a major) part of the evidence of the workings of the brain. Again, it's not only Chomsky who asserts the importance of the study of linguistics for an understanding of the mind, this is now well accepted in the sciences of mind (including, psychology, sociology, etc.). As for "his politics", read: political analysis (not the same thing), that's another subject and should go to another section. Pinkville (talk) 00:25, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

As for Larry Trask, let's take the article cited at Criticism of Noam Chomsky. The start of the article is mainly background on Trask. Trask's criticism of Chomsky comes with this quotation: I have no time for Chomskyan theorising and its associated dogmas of 'universal grammar'. This stuff is so much half-baked twaddle, more akin to a religious movement than to a scholarly enterprise. I am confident that our successors will look back on UG as a huge waste of time. I deeply regret the fact that this sludge attracts so much attention outside linguistics, so much so that many non-linguists believe that Chomskyan theory simply is linguistics, that this is what linguistics has to offer, and that UG is now an established piece of truth, beyond criticism or discussion.The truth is entirely otherwise. Is there anything in this passage that resembles scientific argument or analysis or evidence? I can't detect it. This is merely - as we would call it in WP - an OR/POV slur. Notice also that in this passage Chomsky is attacked for what (unnamed, alleged) people think he means - furthermore, they are alleged people outside the field of linguistics. And who is it, exactly, that presumes that UG is "beyond criticism or discussion", certainly not Chomsky.

Brown, in the succeeding sentence, uses the neologism language instinct (implicitly linking it to Trask, possibly wrongly), a concept without evidence, context, or meaning. Since much of the rest of the article takes off from this term, and nothing more is said of Chomsky's thought, the whole edifice falls to pieces. We end up with nothing known of Trask's substantive thoughts on Chomsky (if there are any), and no enlightenment at all on Chomsky regardless. This is, in my experience, typical of "criticisms" of Chomsky's thought (whether linguistics or politics). Pinkville (talk) 02:19, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Re Trask: He was being quoted, not writing a Wikipedia article. Besides, Chomsky is not known for mincing words himself. And Trask was highly respected in his fields. But just one more thing, then I'll disappear under the radar for a while (real world and all that): You said "apparent" means "visible". True enough. But it also means "seeming" and that was how I understood it, that is I read "apparently effortless" as "seemingly effortless", which may have caused some misunderstanding. But I'll return when I'm satisfied that my statistics is up to scratch again. That may be a matter of some weeks. (Although I don't promise not to make small forays now and then - anyway, this whole discussion has got so splintered, that each of us should maybe write a concise expose of what we have meant - personally I've got the feeling that I have not managed to deliver the message I wanted, and doubtless you can say the same.) See you then and all the best Io (talk) 14:14, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

PS: Sometimes you continue thinking about something even after having sworn to let be for a time. Personally I can't see anything wrong with the article. It was cited on a criticism page, and there, at least, POV's are not out of place - after all, if you criticize something it is by definition your point of view. I don't know what OR menas. But if Chomsky didn't come up with the notion of the language organ, someone at least did, it is something you hear about often, and if Chomsky has contented himself by talking about a language facualty, then we're back on square one, i.e. we learn to speak, hence we have the faculty for it. In any case, the linguistic community is by no means as solidly Chomskyan as you would have - the man is after all not infallible (or is he!?). All the best (and now I'm off for the time being). Io (talk) 15:20, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

OK, definitely the last one for the time being, but I suddenly rememberd a book I have, Languages and Machines by Thomas Sudkamp. He gives due treatment to the Chomsky Normal Form and the Chomsky Hierarchy (which is not to say that they necessarily produce a human language), but I thought you might enjoy the dedication of the book which is as follows:

$\langle {\text{dedication}}\rangle \rightarrow \langle {\text{parents}}\rangle$

$\langle {\text{parents}}\rangle \rightarrow \langle {\text{first name}}\rangle \langle {\text{last name}}\rangle$

$\langle {\text{first name}}\rangle \rightarrow \langle {\text{Donald }}|{\text{ Mary}}\rangle$

$\langle {\text{last name}}\rangle \rightarrow \langle {\text{Sudkamp}}\rangle$

Well, anyway, I thought it was funny and was in need of some really nerdy joke. :-) Cheers Io (talk) 17:23, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

More linguistics including Chomsky

To quote Chomsky:

The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with datahandling or hypothesis-formulating ability of unknown character and complexity. (Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. K. Brown).

Very well, but who is to say that children acquire their mother tongue (or tongues) with remarkable rapidity? It takes a child years to become a competent speaker and for the first couple of years he or she has little to do except absorb and process information. Also note that he says essentially comparable grammars, which somewhat takes the bite out of his argument. It is of course not in dispute that there is a language organ, generally speaking. It's the brain, and since children do learn to speak that point is proven. It is even mostly known which part of the brain is responsible. But nothing about remarkable speed or ease follows logically. A great deal of a child's time is spent learning the language, slowly at first, then more rapidly as he becomes more adept and has more data to compare with. So why have people accepted the statement about extraordinary rapidity so readily? I'm not following any author here. This is something that has bothered me for quite a while, and, believe it or not, the idea is my own, although I do not doubt that some others have thought the same. It is known that children learn the same native language at very different speeds. It is also known that they, generally speaking, learn some facets of the language later than others. So why is the idea so difficult to accept that there may be differences in effort between languages? After all, learning language A may produce a competent speaker in X years and another speaker of language B in the same time, but who can prove that the same amount of intellectual effort is required in both cases? All children have, after all, is time for absortion and digestation of the continous bombardment of external stimuli.

You once said some thing to the effect of, that most who tackle Chomsky fail spectaculary by their own efforts. I hope you were only referring to amateurs like me. Competent linguists have also taken him on and failed to fail, so to speak. :-) (Io)

Actually, I was mostly thinking of the scads of academics (and wannabes) and media types who have taken him on. There's a particularly embarrassing interview by CBC's Evan Solomon of Chomsky (I think it's even on YouTube...) in which the interviewer clearly thinks he's got Chomsky by the balls, but he's only hung himself up by his own nuts. Even at the end, Solomon has no idea what has happened. In my experience, that's quite typical of most wannabe honest-makers of Chomsky. See also, this exemplary letter. There's an example in the field of linguistics I can supply - but the link isn't handy at the moment... I'll get back to you. Pinkville (talk) 02:43, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Regarding the language organ: Its existence is not in dispute any longer, but when Chomsky started (in the 1950s) it was against the backdrop of Skinnerian behaviourism, which denied innatism entirely. To this day, such anti-innatist ideas persist in some related fields, as indicated by a recent essay appearing in Sociology Today (Albert Bergesen, Chomsky Versus Mead, 2004) appealing to peers to accept that the mind has innate structures - against the still prevailing notion (in sociology, Bergesen argues), that it is a blank slate. (If you have access to JSTOR I can provide you with relevant link(s)). And to clarify, the language organ isn't the brain, per se, but the faculty of language which resides in the brain (and which is analogous to the optic system, say).

About the language organ. If its existence is not in dispute, where is it? An organ is a well defined concept in biology and the human body has been mapped very thoroughly. Another thing. If you read the opening sentences of the article on Stephen Pinker you'll see that there are two groups of psychologists and/or linguists debating evolution and heredity, very complex fields both, way out of their field. Methinks it is a case of hubris on both sides and I cannot but think of Her Almightiness, The Invisible Pink Unicorn. Cheers Io (talk) 20:33, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

As for the rapidity of child language acquisition, I responded to that in my earlier comment, above. But one point, studies show that (normal) children learn the same mother tongue at about the same rate, and in the same way, developmentally speaking. That is, it's not the case that some learn all the verbs first, then the nouns, and so on, while others learn nouns, then verbs. There are phases to language acquisition, but - on evidence - these seem to be essentially (i.e. fundamentally) the same regardless of the specific language involved. Furthermore, as Chomsky has pointed out, the apparent radical differences between various languages turn out to be much less different on closer examination than was previously thought - with at most very few deep differences between any languages noted. The variation between natural languages is all superficial, the deep structures are the same. Pinkville (talk) 03:02, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually, it's been fun writing this. I'll take you up on your offer of discussion on our respective talk pages. I hope you think this is a discussion, not some aimless rambling. :-) Cheerio Io (talk) 20:38, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Kibitzing here . . . if you want to see Chomsky taken on by a sharp interviewer, see his interrogation by Cap'n Spock in "Chomsky on the Enterprise", chapter 6 of this excellent book. -- Hoary (talk) 03:28, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

I've only read bits and pieces of Pullum, but I like what he has to say. Of course, the whole subject is... Fascinating... Pinkville (talk) 11:28, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Evidence under your nose

Extending an invitation to me, like you did, is like giving a pyromaniac a matchbox. Anyway, yoy've probably heard this anecdote, but I've always found it funny and instructive (see topic title) so here goes:

A linguistics professor was giving a lecture about how various positive and negative statements can change meanings in various ways - double negatives, positive and negative etc. - but he ended the lecture by saying that there had yet to be found an example of two positives adding up to a negative - at which someone in the audience quickly stood up and said contemptuously: "Yeah, right!"

Well, perhaps I've got an odd sense of humour. Cheers, and by all means enlighten me as is within your power, since you have been collecting readings - the only hurdle should then be my comprehension. :-) Io (talk) 22:41, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

har har. Good joke! Pinkville (talk) 03:22, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

language

I'll start with some general comments here, and then respond to your specific points, in turn, above. I've read much of Chomsky's available writings on language and mind intended for a non-specialist audience. I'm no linguist and I'm no scientist, but I have an active interest in the science of mind - the cognitive sciences, and I read what I can on the subject. I've also read much of Chomsky's political writings, and though I am personally interested in any possible connections between the two, it's important to point out that Chomsky himself doesn't see any significant knowable link between them. See, for instance, his opening remarks in his well-known 1970 lecture, Language and Freedom, also an excellent introduction to his understanding - at the time - of language and mind.

First, as I read it, Chomsky's primary intent in studying language is to understand the human mind. The premise is that language is the only part of the mind we understand at all well (and, at that, not so much anyway) and the only part of the mind for which we have easy access to evidence, i.e. language itself. Compare, for instance, psychology, which has only a relatively recent history as a subject of serious scientific inquiry* and which remains comparatively mysterious, without any known components that could compare with the known components of language: words, syntax, etc. Until recently (and, in no small measure, following from Chomsky), psychology was still mired in fallacious extrapolations from the pecking of pigeons to human behaviour (but that's another subject).

Though Chomsky writes strictly in English, he grew up reading, speaking, and teaching Hebrew. He studied Arabic in university, and the anecdotal evidence seems to be that he knows Yiddish, French and other languages besides.

Anyway, enough of preliminaries... Pinkville (talk) 01:35, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

*The serious study of language goes back thousands of years. I'd say (to my knowledge, Chomsky says nothing like this), that the study of psychology has - until the 19th century - primarily been conducted in literature. But there are Indian texts analysing language that date back well before Christ.

Some readings:

• Marc D. Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch. The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?, 2002.
• W. Tecumseh Fitch, Marc D. Hauser, and Noam Chomsky. The evolution of the language faculty: Clarifications and implications, 2005.
• Chomsky, interview. The 'Chomskyan Era', 2000.

You'll find the Indian texts discussed here. As point of historical interest, you might also want look this up. It turns out that it was a countryman of mine who invented minimal pairs. :-). About the rest, ease of learning and all that more will follow, but I have seen too many examples of siblings learning to speak at different rates to be convinced that children learn their mother tongues at about the same rate. It makes a lot of difference, whether you give or take a year at that age. That the language organ in Chomsky's sense is no longer in dispute, is a very bold statement, and so is the statement that the deep structure (if there is one) is basically the same. There is consensus that language processing takes place in the brain and two parts of the brain have been associated with it, Broca's area and Wernicke's area. That is about as far as the agreement goes. If there were agreement, there would be little to write about, and yet authors pour out articles like the end is near.

Sorry, forgot to sign. All the best Io (talk) 21:01, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

To get something out of the way

I think it should be mentioned that I'm not the least bit interested in Chomsky's politics. The bits and pieces I've heard or read are bizarre to me, and they will probably not be what the man will be remembered for. It is a pity that the article Criticism of Noam Chomsky deals almost exclusively with politics.

As for the rest, I think I'll begin with Chomsky and psychology for the simple reason that I have the 12 volume Handbook of Psychology, Editor-in-Chief Irving B. Weiner, Wiley & Sons, 2003. It is thus accessible to me (admittedly in a pdf-version), and fairly recent, covers the whole field and is published by a reputable house by reputable authors. Chomsky does get a fair amount of mentions there.

But, there's always a but, I'm getting pressed for time, preparing for the autumn semester (both as a grad student and TA, although I'm much older than the average for either) so I'll have to make do with easily accessible literature, and I don't have time for anything lengthy. Reading about anything but statistics and time series will have to be squeezed in, and then I also have an enormous amount of precipitation data to process. This does not mean I'm backtracking. I'm just warning you that this might drag on. Think of it as some sort of mail chess. I'll write when I've got time, energy and inspiration.

As an aside regarding psychology, it is a relative latecomer as a serious science. Freudian analysis does not qualify as science, for instance, although Freud himself acknowledged that his construction would eventually give way to chemistry, biology and the like. Unfortunately the next generation forgot about that and the id, ego, superego and whatnot took on lives of their own. It's worth remembering Richard Feynman's comparison of psychoanalysis to witch-doctoring. (Feynman, of course, realized that psychology based on solid evidence from biology, chemistry and physics is science - after all, he knew better than most what the scientific method entails.) But psychologists were poorly educated in those fields for a long time. I remember the time when Roger Sperry got his Nobel Prize. It was customary then (perhaps still is) for the winners in chemistry, physics and medicine to have a discussion afterwards, where they often went far and wide. Sperry (who at least knew how to conduct experiments) spent quite some time trying to convince the physicists that they (the physicists) didn't really understand physics!

Thank you for the links, and I have high hopes, now that everyone is showing himself from his better side (well, you didn't show a bad side as I recall :-), that this should be both fun and educational. All the best Io (talk) 20:08, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Physiology and neural networking

After stealing some time to read a couple of articles, it seems to me that Chomsky thinks of languages mainly in terms of computers. Indeed, his first level refers to Turing machines. But, has he ever delved into neural networking (I mean artificial networking here) which is how computers learn and would seem to be a good paradigm for the human learning process. (Neural networking was actually inspired by non-chomskian ideas about how the brain works.) Also, has he ever studied the actual biological or more precisely, physiological, function of the brain? He is a linguist, not a physiologist. To end this with a short analogy, which I heard years ago: "Chomsky's approach is comparable to trying to find out how a car engine works by studying its exhaust fumes." (I can't supply you with a reference, but the analogy stuck in my mind.) I'm returning to my probability distributions now, but damn the Internet and damn Wikipedia - once you get going the next thing you know is that you're a couple of hours past bedtime and you've got nothing to show for it in real life. :-) All the best Io (talk) 19:10, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

continued

One question about the deep structure. This actually requires a prologue, which is as follows.

It seems to be an article of faith among linguists of all stripes that all languages are, more or less, equally "complex". The reasons they give for that happen to coincide to a large degree with Chomsky's arguments (at various stages in his development). Examples are, for instance:

Children learn languages at approximately the same rate.

Any child can be taken as an infant, transplanted to a different community and he/she will learn the language there at the same rate as the natives. (No argument there, as far as I'm concerned.)

Some languages may be less complicated than others in one respect (e.g. Icelandic morphology is way more complicated than that of English, to name two languages I know), but the complexity to make it up is in that case stuck in other areas of the language. (English syntax is often mentioned in this case.) But I've just been leafing through an Icelandic syntax, 800 pages or so and still much left to be explained, so I can't really accept that reasoning.

This leads me to the conclusion, that the credo of equal complexity (not that there is any metric for that, as far as I know, please tell me, if you do) is a preparation for another credo, namely that all languages are equally worthy of study, which I heartily agree with.

So, the question becomes as follows: Knowing the phonetic, morphological and syntactical complexities of at least one language well, I would be interested in knowing, how a Universal grammar accounts for all that. Icelandic (or pick another language to your liking) has exceptions and exceptions to exceptions in abundance, it is morphologically complex and its syntax is at least as complicated as the English one, to say nothing abut the phonology, so it seems to me, having just had a brief refresher, that the majority of the language has to be aquired without the help of an innate grammar, which by definition produces a finite set of rules and does not predict exceptions. (Recursion does, indeed, provide for an infinite set, but no language can realize that.) As any historical liguist will tell you, there are various forces at work, analogy, levelling and so on, all of which has to be learnt by exposure to each language. Cheers Io (talk) 19:05, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

PS: If you would like to save some space on your talk page, and take this discussion up per e-mail, it's OK. We both chose to be able to receive mail, so that is an option. Just drop me a line and I'll answer. If not, let's continue here. All the best Io (talk) 19:20, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

I think you're simplifying the notion of UG and exaggerating the significance that it has for many people concerned with it. You may find Newmeyer's Possible and Probable Languages of interest. -- Hoary (talk) 21:25, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm very probably simplifying the notion, which is actually bad, since a more complicated system than what I have got the impression of, only makes things worse. I may be exaggerating the impact (let's hope so) but then we have to take into account, which period we are talking about. Linguistics seems to be recovering from Chomsky, gradually, but there was a time when Chomsky was linguistics, for all practical purposes. Thanks for the reference, but I don't have the time nor resources to spend on reading books on the subject. I'll have to make do with what I already have (e.g. Comrie's Language Universals), but otherwise I'm really in a pinch, learning and doing other stuff, about which see above. But thanks and all the best Io (talk) 16:40, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

I've lead a varied life for the past decade or more, but the only constant has been my interest in mathematics. And, having read quite a bit about it and having an interest in languages, that is where I see Chomsky fail. Just to clarify. All the best Io (talk) 18:41, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

PS: If there is a language organ, where is it? You can't postulate an organ without proving its physical existence. Now, according to Pinkville, if I have understood him correctly, its existence is not in debate (a questionable statement in itself) and also that the brain isn't it. I really am shocked. You have to be able to make predictable claims, and if you go as far as postulating an organ without being able to locate it you're in the same situation as when I postulate the existence of my ketchup-gland, which hasn't been found yet but does regulate the amount of ketchup in my blood-stream and also provides my blood with its colour - medical opinion notwithstanding, the red blood cells have nothing to do with the colour - the medical doctors have just not understood linguistics correctly. (I'll leave out a smiley here, I don't know the one which combines sarcasm and everything else - but this was a deliberately extreme example): Cheers Io (talk) 19:27, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Chomsky & politics

From above:

Chomsky has, from the little I know of his career, regularly altered his standpoind to stay in the limelight, to say nothing about his politics, where he has shown him self to be a master of prevarication. Since you've sent me a couple of pro-chomsky-links, I'll give you this in return: http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomskyhoax.html . Of course, this website is squarely against him, but then again, that much was to be expected and may serve as a healthy counterweight. Reading Chomsky on the Khmer Rouge is instructive, for instance. But to get to Larry Trask again, I mentioned him because he was the first of too few linguists linguists mentioned on Criticism of Noam Chomsky. The main focus of that article is regrettably on politics - regrettably, since he is absolutely no political thinker - bottom 1% seems about right. Cheers Io (talk) 21:19, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

I honestly have no idea what you mean about Chomsky's "prevarication" in his politics, though I'm willing to be enlightened. It would be convenient if any of Bogdoanor's posts or links amounted to anything, but they don't. First, Chomsky's texts are always well referenced, and so any reader (like me) can see for themselves what underlies his arguments. I didn't provide "pro-chomsky-links", I provided links to his own works. And (in this context) the inclusion of the word "hoax" in a title ought to be a tip-off of mere propaganda. Regardless, take your own advice, read Chomsky on the Khmer Rouge (e.g. in 1970, in 1977, with Edward Herman, and in 2007), it's a rather different account than Bogdanor or Kamm pretend. Finally, your assertion that Chomsky is absolutely no political thinker cannot be taken seriously. Pinkville (talk) 01:58, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Rest later, but why do you consider Chomsky a political thinker? Has he contributed anything but some conspiracy theories, either his own or borrowed from others? Thinking about politics does not make you a political thinker. So I stand by that point - he is no political thinker, merely someone who hopped on the lecture circuit. One anti-chomsky review is here: http://www.cosmoetica.com/B350-DES289.htm. From that review comes this from his wife (but you can, of course, always blame it on her, not Chomsky himself): The lone interesting thing she says is that 9/11 was a great thing for the Chomskys, for he has reaped a great deal of money in speaking fees since then. Cheers Io (talk) 18:33, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

BTW: Most of the articles on the Chomsky Hoax page (and I did state that it was obviously anti-chomsky, so you didn't need to point that out) do refer to sources or, in a few cases, have the great man speak for himself. A reference does not need to be in a section labelled References to be one. As for Chomsky, in his own words, you gave me a link to an interview, and I must say, it seemed scripted - some star-gazing acolyte talking to his prophet. Would you expect Chomsky to have anything but pro-chomsky articles on his page? That source is at least as biased as the ones who simply say "I'm against Chomsky", and his method is, of course more insidious, since the others have already stood up and been counted whereas he has not. Cheers Io (talk) 20:58, 22 July 2008 (UTC)