2 Chomsky suggests to employ the term 'cognize' ('cognization') to indicate the "unconscious or tacit or implicit" feature of linguistic knowledge. Noam Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use. (henceforth, KL) (New York: Praeger, 1986), 269.
3 Noam Chomsky, "Explaining Language Use", Philosophical Topics, vol. 20 no. 1, spring 1992, 212.
4 The most well-known figure in this regard is Gottlob Frege.
5) LT, 19.
6) KL, 15 One more example: "[W]e say that the
language of southern Sweden was once Danish but became Swedish a
few years later without changing, as a result of military
conquest."
LT, 20.
7) This is a critical remark on,
in particular, Frege's position. Admittedly Frege's main concern
is formal languages or rigorous symbolic systems for cognitive
purposes. But the ideal picture of language and thought can
hardly be the general model for scientific research, according
to Chomsky. In science we do share some thoughts (that is,
assumptions and methodology), but they are undergoing changes
and responding to empirical findings.
10) Biology and
geology included. See Noam Chomsky, Powers and Prospects:
Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order (henceforth,
PP), (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1996), 49.
11) LT, 23.
My emphasis. Chomsky suggests that lexical items are analogous
with filters and lenses. See "Explaining Language
Use", 221. Akeel Bilgrami's observation (in his Belief and
Meaning, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992) on "a
linguistic agent's perspective on things" is thus highly
recommended by Chomsky. See Noam Chomsky, "Language and
Nature" (henceforth, LN), Mind, Vol. 104, 413,
January, 1995, 31. Asked about the basis of this perspective
provided by mental lexicon, Chomsky acknowledges that so far
little results have been obtained in the field. But he does not
accept Bilgrami's suggestion that it is self-knowledge that
grounds the perspective in question. For Chomsky, "[i]f we had
a theory about agent's perspectives, we might discover that it
is not accessible to us any more than the principles that are
involved in [a slightly more complex sentence that] are
accessible in us." LT, LT, 90.
12) " Explaining
Language ", 220.
13) "[P]erson X refers to Y
by expression E under circumstances C, so the relation is at
least tetradic; and Y need not be a real object in the world
or regarded that way by X."
LN, 43.
14) These are Chomsky's
examples. See KL, 11.
15) The sign * indicates that
the sentence is not well-formed.
16) See
KL, 41-43, where Chomsky
argues that his internalist phonology is superior to a mere
superficial analysis of sound structure and segmentation of
sounds.
17) The
information coded in a lexical entry is unpredictable and not
derivable from general properties of a specific language. What
is more, every datum contained is non-redundant and not to be
entailed by the other datum.
19) How far
can the issue of how to put knowledge into use be studied? Man
is not an automaton, compelled to respond to every environmental
change, although he is 'inclined and incited' in exercising his
information. Human action is creative in essence. In terms of
language use, man can express his thoughts using new
combinations of words, and understand these words; also, he can
apply the same expression appropriately to novel situations.
This fascinating fact - that is, the 'creative use of language'
- indeed captures Descartes's interest, as it distinguishes
human beings from the other species. Chomsky inherits this very
basic idea from Descartes and calls it 'Descartes's Problem'.
Such a 'problem' - concerning how a person exercises his/her
free will on the basis of a given knowledge to new situations -
might be unsolvable.
Chomsky tends to think that at most we can describe, not explain in
strictly causal terms, how we act. Actually our intellectual
limitation is not surprising; it is a fact of human nature that our
cognition, including of ourselves, is to a certain extent restricted.
Our 'creative use of language' is now a mystery for us, and may still
be forever. Though it seems to be hopeless to study in a scientific
way a unique person's freely applying his/her acquired language in
concrete situations, we can inquire, of course with some degree of
idealisation, how our system of language information is related with
beliefs and expections, etc., and with the other systems of mental
capacities and abilities like memory, attention and recognition, in
producing and perceiving meaningful sentences. As an analogy, though
it is not necessary that a person chooses to go to that rather than
this place, the biological nature determines considerably his/her way
of moving, perceiving and calculating and how these abilities
co-operate to achieve the goal. Probably only these aspects of human
nature can be studied. See LT, 53, and
KLKL, 222-223.
20) See Noam
Chomsky, The Minimalist
Program (henceforth, MP), (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995), 15.
21) S stands for sentence, NP for noun phrase, V for verb, VP for verb phrase, DET for determiner and N for noun.
22) W. V.
Quine, "Methodological Reflections on Current Linguistic Theory"
(henceforth "Methodological Reflections"), in Donald Davidson
and Gilbert Harman, eds., Semantics of Natural Language,
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972), 442.
25) More precisely, the first step is Numeration (an array of lexical
choices, including abstract features as well as lexical heads), and
the second step is Select (selection from Numeration). See Chapter
Two for a more detailed account.
26) See Andrew
Radford, Syntactic Theory and
the Structure of English: A Minimalist Approach (henceforth,
Radford), (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), in particular, 170-178.
27) Whether a move is
'short' or not is determined by the number of nodes (that is, the
points in a tree diagram carrying labels of category) crossed or in
an equivalent metric of some kind. See "Categories and
Transformations", 4.5.5 and 4.5.6 for Chomsky's discussion of the
MLC.
28) Alec Marantz,
"The
Minimalist Program", in G. Webelhuth, ed., Government and Binding
Theory and the Minimalist Program (hereafter GB&MP), (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1995), 358. My italics.
29) See Noam
Chomsky, Rules
and Representations (henceforth, RR), (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980), 220.
30) Chomsky does
not exclude the possibility that there is more than one computational
system (I-language) that can generate the same set of SDs. See MP,
15.
34)I borrow this example from Loraine K. Obler and Kris Gjerlow, Language and the Brain, (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), 150.
35)See Yosef Grodzinsky,
"There is an entity called
agrammatic aphasia", Brain and Language, 41 (1991): 555-564.
37)Descriptive adequacy
can also be attributed to a general linguistic theory "if
it makes a descriptively adequate grammar available for each natural
language" (Aspects, 24), by
setting a format for analysis, which covers all varieties of
languages.
38) Chomsky provides some
illustration as to the explanatory inadequacy of the rule-system
conception of grammar, that is, the reason why there is a need to
postulate principles to embrace a variety of specific rules. See 3.3
of KL.
39)This is an idealised
statement, of course. Language acquisition is actually limited by the
inborn learning systems - the LAD being one of them - and conditions
on learnability. As Chomsky writes, "The attainable languages are
those that fall in the intersection of those determined by UG and the
humanly learnable systems, and conditions on learnability might
exclude certain grammars permitted by UG." KL, 50.
40)Chomsky even characterises generative grammar "as an area of research, with the domain which this tension [between descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy] remains unsolved." KL, 56.
42)Distinct from these functional elements are those known as lexical or contentful elements, that is, the word stems.
43) "Variation of
language is essentially morphological in character, including the
critical question of which parts of a computation are overtly
realized." MP, 7.
44)David W. Green &
Others, Cognitive Science: An
Introduction, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 207-208. These
examples are originally given in G. M. Awbery, The Syntax of Welsh,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)
45) "I would like to
suggest that in certain fundamental respects we do not really learn
language; rather, grammar grows in the mind. ... In both cases, [that
is, the development of physical organs and of language], it seems, the
final structure attained and its integration into a complex system of
organs is largely predetermined by our genetic program, which provides
a highly restrictive schematism that is fleshed out and articulated
through interaction with the environment (embryological or
post-natal)."
RR, 134.
46)Chomsky's well-known
argument from impoverished stimuli appeals basically to the fact that
children are normally exposed to 'impoverished', rather than
'degenerate', data of a specific language. Whereas the latter means
that the data obtained are not well-formed, the former means that the
experience that a child gets contains thin evidence. In earlier days
of generative grammar, the degenerate character of the linguistic
input in language acquisition was more emphasised. An example can be
found in Aspects, 31 and also note 14. But since the 1980s, Chomsky's
idea of the 'impoverished stimuli' has been changed and rested much
less on the fact of input deficiency. As Cook & Newson reported, "the
claim that the input data for the child are degenerate has had to be
modified in the light of the 1970s research into speech addressed to
children, which showed that, on the contrary, such input was highly
regular. Newport (1976) found that only 1 out of 1,500 utterances
addressed to children was ungrammatical." V. J. Cook & Mark Newson,
Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996), 116.
48)Noam Chomsky,
Reflections
on Language (henceforth, RL), (New York: Pantheon Books,
1975), 29. The terms 'grammar' and 'universal grammar' had been
confusing, since people used them to refer to the attained and initial
states of a child's language faculty as well as to the theories of
these states put forward by linguists. To avoid the unclarity,
Chomsky has sometimes restricted the terms 'grammar' and 'universal
grammar' to the latter use. Accordingly it is not appropriate to say
that a child has a grammar or is born with a universal grammar.
Instead, we say that the child has a language - an I-language, that
is, the attained state of its language faculty and that it is born
with a genetically given initial state of language. "The term
'grammar' has also been used in a variety of ways. In conventional
usage, a grammar is a description or theory of a language, an object
constructed by a linguist. Let us keep to this usage. Then
associated with the various technical notions of language there are
corresponding notions of grammar and of universal grammar (UG)." KL,
19. However, in order to indicate that the language user's SL. and S0
are different cognitive states of a computational-representational
(C-R) system, I think the terms 'grammar' and 'universal grammar'
might well be used to refer to these states, only if the context is
clear.
49)Contrast (a) and (a'):
(a) buy [a book] || on [the boat] || afraid [of dogs] || claim [that he's right]
V complement P complement A complement N complement
(a') [Hon-o] katta ||[Fune] ni ||[inu o] kowagatte ||[Zibun ga tadashi-to-iu] shuchoo
complement V complement P complement A complement N
(book buy) (boat on) (dog afraid) (self right claim )
These examples are provided in Cook & Newson, 142-143. shichoo is replaced by shuchoo.
50) Contrast (b) and (b'):
(b) He bought the house.
*Bought the house.
(b') (Lui) comprņ la casa.
((He) bought the house.)
51)As mentioned in 1.4, the verb-first character of English is further
explained by its strong V-feature. This idea is generalised to other
head categories. And the fact that English sentences have a subject
is due to the strong EPP-feature of T.
52)Noam Chomsky, Lectures
on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures, (henceforth, LGB),
(Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1981), 8-9.
55)The criticism comes
from Alexander George: "Now whatever they are, abstract objects
are not constituents of the minds or brains of speakers and so
I-languages are not states of human brains. Rather, they provide
indirect characterizations of these states by being potential objects
of a speaker's knowledge. Thus while an I-language is not an 'actual
state of the mind/brain', knowing an I-language is. I-languages are
not in the physical world, although the particular brain states that
can be abstractly characterized as knowledge of them are. The task of
generative grammar is to characterize possible human I-languages, that
is, on this conception, to characterize a family of abstract objects."
Alexander George (together with Michael Brody and Noam Chomsky),
"Review Discussion:
Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use"
(henceforth, "Review Discussion of KL") in Mind & Language, Vol. 2
No.2 Summer 1987, 158. George acknowledges that his idea that
language should be divorced from any cognitive state came from James
Higginbotham's paper "Is Grammar Psychological?" in How Many
Questions? Essays in Honor of Sidney Morgenbesser, L. Cauman,
I. Levi, C. Parsons and R. Schwartz, eds., (New York: Hackett, 1983).
56)George took it for
granted that the abstract objects with which linguistics is concerned
are mathematical in nature, as shown in his 1989 paper "How Not to
Become Confused about Linguistics", George wrote "Ever since the birth
of generative linguistics in the 1950s, disagreements over the
structure of the grammar have arisen. What cannot be disputed is that
the grammar is a mathematical object, hence abstract and not located
in space or time." Alexander George, ed., Reflections on
Chomsky
(henceforth, RC), (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 90. But in his
reply to Katz on behalf of Chomsky, George recently wrote, "On
Chomsky's view, ... [linguistics] is fully empirical, for, unlike the
objects of mathematics, these entities exist only contingently."
Alexander George, "Katz Astray," Mind & Language, Vol. 11, No. 3
September 1996, 295-305, my emphasis.
57)"There is no initial
plausibility to the idea that apart from the truths of grammar
concerning the I-language and the truths of UG concerning S0 there is
an additional domain of fact about P-language [a language in the
Platonic Heaven], independent of any psychological states of
individuals." KL, 33.
59) Chomsky notes,
"the fact that objects appear in the sensory output in positions
"displaced" from those in which they are interpreted, under the most
principled assumptions about interpretations. This is an irreducible
fact about human language, expressed somehow in every contemporary
theory of language, however the facts about displacement may be
formulated. ... The displacement property reflects the disparity - in
fact, complementarity - between morphology (checking of features) and
q-theory (assignment of semantic roles), an apparent fact about
natural language that is increasingly highlighted as we progress
toward minimalist objectives." MP, 221-222. See 5.2 of this thesis
for further discussion.
60) The example of neural
net theory is given by Chomsky in Noam Chomsky, "Review Discussion of
KL", 182.
61) Noam Chomsky, "Review Discussion of KL", 182.
62) Noam Chomsky, "Linguistics and
Adjacent Fields: A Personal View", in Asa Kasher, ed., The
Chomskyan Turn, (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 6.
63) See PP, 34.
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