Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origins and Use

by Noam Chomsky

Attempts to indentify the fundamental concepts of language, argues that the study of language reveals hidden facts about the mind, and looks at the impact of propaganda

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychology

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "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 is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions and the media.
Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants (his father was William Chomsky) in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B.F. Skinner.
An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard M. Nixon's list of political opponents. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Chomsky's commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. An anti-Zionist, Chomsky considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid, and criticizes U.S. support for Israel.
Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. Chomsky remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, U.S. involvement and Israel's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mass media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Since 2017, he has been Agnese Helms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.

Reviews

[Nat · Rating 4 out of 5]

The chapter on rule-following in this book is intriguing. Chomsky responds to Kripke's claims in Wittgenstein on Rule-Following that Wittgenstein's reflections on rule-following pose a problem for linguistic theory. Chomsky's reply is surprising: he says that rules have a perfectly legitimate role to play in linguistic theory, even though they aren't accessible to consciousness and don't justify any particular response. They are like explanatory posits in any physical theory. So Chomsky doesn't really offer a solution to the rule-following paradox--he doesn't address the worry that there's no account of how we're justified in producing one response rather than another. But that's not a problem for him because he's interested in a natural scientific explanation of "grammaticality", not an account in terms of justifying reasons for why we find certain sentences grammatical and others ungrammatical. Our finding them grammatical or ungrammatical is the result of biological facts about us. I think Chomsky's reply to the rule-following paradox has been largely ignored in the literature on rule-following (I can only find a couple of references to it, and no substantial articles other than Crispin Wright's "Wittgenstein's Rule-Following Considerations and the Central Project of Theoretical Linguistics"). That seems like a mistake to me--Chomsky's position is directly relevant to debates about "tacit" knowledge of rules, and offers a different position that strikes me as more reasonable than the idea that we "tacitly know" a bunch of grammatical and semantical rules that we can't articulate.

There's a lot more to be said about this issue.

[Tim Gasparik · Rating 3 out of 5]

I could not get into this book, and I love linguistics with a burning passion. The ideas are fantastic and this is ground breaking work by Chomksy, but he is so dry and hard to read. If dense material is your thing, which it is for me sometimes, then this is a book for you.

[Eva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chomsky ya se convirtió en mi bestie por verlo tanto: en Psicología, Gramática y Lingüística. Sin embargo, soy bastante ignorante en su teoría. El resumen que puedo hacer con mi mentalidad, hoy, es una serie de palabras claves: gramática generativa, gramática universal, gramática particular, facultad lingüística, facultad del lenguaje, conocimiento de una lengua, innato, mente/cerebro, hablante/oyente. Y que la gramática es una disciplina viva. Veremos si logro internalizar sus conceptos.

[Jacqueline]

“Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied."

[Rajith · Rating 4 out of 5]

With this book Chomsky,

Chomsky, like all good politicians, has changed his mind on how the mind works.

His original theory was that brains are equipped with a "universal grammar"
that predisposes us to learn languages,
and that the sentences of a language can be accounted for by a set of rules (its grammar).

Now he believes that there is no universal grammar,
just a circuit in the brain that is more or less plastic:
change the connections and you get one or the other language.

There are no rules of grammar,
but there are associations between sounds and concepts:
we learn a concept when we make the connection with a sound.

Basically, we "rediscover" concepts that we have always unconsciously known, since prehistoric times

Chomsky is probably correct in stating that the "rules" of grammar are only a consequence,
==.

Most linguists simply neglect history and the fact that we are a species capable of learning and of transmitting knowledge.
Were we a species that does not change over the centuries,
A study of the history of language would probably show that there are many more regularities than one supposes irregular verbs probably have a reason to be what they are (they may have been regular in the past, according to a long-forgotten rule), words may be derived from very simple sounds, idiomatic expressions may be based on bodily features, etc. If one studies history, there might be simple explanations for everything. If one takes the human world as it is today and tries to make sense of it, the task is virtually impossible.

[William Schram · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book introduces the ideas of how language is learned or acquired. I suppose this is a good introduction to Noam Chomsky, I really haven't read any of his other works.

The book is split into five major chapters with most of the focus being on chapter three. This particular chapter covers Plato's Problem, which is the concept that even with our limited experience, we all have a great deal of creativity with language. We form new sentences and other ideas as easily as we breathe.

At the end of each chapter is a section that covers the little notes made in the chapter. So for instance, if I have a word or phrase that is numbered '7' say, that note would be at the end of the chapter rather than on the page it is noted.

[T. Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was my introduction to Chomsky. The final chapter gives a taste of his political writing.