Noam Chomsky

Full Name: Avram Noam Chomsky

Born: Dicember 7th, 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US

Fields: Linguistics, analytic philosophy, cognitive science, intellectual history, political criticism.

Parents: William Zev Chomsky (studious of the Hebrew tongue, and one of its most distinguished grammarian) and Elsie Simonofsky, Hebrew teacher.

Is very known for his studies and contribution in linguistics, strognly criticizing the behaviorist theories about acquisition of language. Also known as The Father of Modern Linguistics.

School of thought

Transformational generative grammar.

Concepts:

Generative grammar: is the study of syntax in the sentences, which means, that it studies the organization, combination and grammatical rules in a sentence. It’s called generative, cause Noam Chomsky considers that a person can generate a limitless amount of sentences out of the limited sentences (or words) he or she has heard, only by having a lexicon (meaning of words in the cognitive structure).

An example could be the following sentence, said by a person: “The bus went out of its way because the guy who was driving it is blind”.

That’s a sentence that is very uncommon, and not many people have heard it or said it before. These new sentences are easy to generate (and understand), even though we haven’t ever heard them before. Noam Chomsky explains this in the following way: he says that a person is born with the mental capacity to generate and understand grammatical structures ever since he or she is a baby going through the process of the language acquisition, that’s why he says that all the languages in the world are grammatically related to each other (universal grammar), and it’s because of the innate competence that human being has to acquire language and understand its structure.

Why transformational?

Concepts:

There are two types of grammatical structures according to Chomsky and Zelling Harris.

Kernel sentences (mental aspect of the grammatical structure): kernel sentences or deep structures are a representation of the meaning in the sentence. All those thoghts that we may have before saying the sentences. Kernel structures are then the semanticity of any sentence.

Nonkernel sentences (physical aspect of the grammatical structure): nonkernel sentences or surface structures are the form in which sentences appear (said or written). They are then the visible and hearable presentation of the sentence.

We can say that both complement each other, and form a process in which kernel sentences come first and nonkernel ones come after.

Chomsky affirms that grammar is transformational because we can change (transform) the nonkernel sentences, but only nonkernel ones. For example:

• Amanda was walking by the street when she found a 1$ billet.

• When Amanda found the 1$ billet she had been walking by the street.

In this way both sentences are different in their physical ways. They’re not using exactly the same words, and are not organized in the same way, but they intent to express the same thought. So they may have different surface structures, but the deep structure is the same.

There are sentences like this one:

• “I saw a man on a hill with a telescope”

This sentence could have the following possibilities:

• There’s a man on a hill, and I’m watching him with my telescope.

• There’s a man on a hill, who I’m seeing, and he has a telescope.

• There’s a man, and he’s on a hill that also has a telescope on it.

• I’m on a hill, and I saw a man using a telescope.

This type of sentence, which could have many interpretations of its deep structure, is called ambiguous sentence, and we can decode it by the context we’re involved by.

Theory publication year: It was publicated in 1957, with his first book Syntactic Structures.

Main tenets or premises

• Grammar is the ability of generating new sentences in human’s brain. It is also transformational, we can change the surface structures.

•  Chomsky says that kids are born with an innate capability to understand the grammatical rules of any language, they don’t imitate adults.That innate capability is like a computer programming in our heads called The Language Acquisition Device (LAD).

• Chomsky affirms that everybody is able to say new sentences even though they haven’t ever heard them before.

• The basis to Chomsky’s linguistic theory is rooted in biolinguistics, holding that the primary principles in the structure of language are biologically determined in the human mind and consequently genetically transmitted. He therefore argues that all humans share the same primary linguistic structure, no matter sociocultural differences. In adopting this position, Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of mB. F. Skinner which views the mind as a blank slate and thus treats language as learned behavior

Contributions to the study of language

He made a great contribution to the study of language. He left a study about the division and organization of words, with new concepts to this study that help us understand how they function. His study let us see how amazing language is, as a unique process of Human being.

Noam Chomsky is the father of modern Linguistics. He showed that Behaviorism, the dominant approach to language at the time, was no longer to be the way of studying language. He made language scientific, because he studied it from the cognitive structures and he took into account many important processes, rather than behaviorism that understood language as a branch of human being’s behavior, and it studied language from the outside, without paying attention to the process that occurs in our brain.

Drawbacks of the theory

There are several linguists that refute the following aspects of his theory:

Chomsky’s understanding of linguistics: he says that linguistics is the formal syntax. So, any expression that isn’t a formal symbol or element, is not linguistics. And let’s remember that linguistics is the study of what is said and how it’s said or expressed, not the rules of how it should be said. Chomsky doesn’t take too much into account the meaning. For him, the semanticity is barely important in his study.

Innatism: this is the essence of Chomsky’s studies. Critics think that we don’t have a biological structure for language that it’s more like an imitation process when we interact with adults.

This model of study is presented with very little limitations. The fundamental processes of language acquisition are presented in a too easy and flexible way like the understanding of grammatical rules, the response formation… Every little aspect of the construction  of sentences in our heads.

Experts also say that Chomsky hasn’t provide the enough principles to believe that there’s a universal grammar, because he hasn’t learned nor studied the 7000 of languages around the world to say that all of them share the same structure, he only took or studied a small number of languages to make his research.

Without society’s stimuli to talk, children are very slow in the process of learning words and grammatical rules. Babies who are raised in institutions without an adult smiling or laughing in order to reinforce their effort take more time to start talking like the other ones, who are raised surrounded by their families reinforcing the language out of them. The biggest attention given to the firstborn in a family explain why the firstborn tend to be more advanced in his linguistic development than those who are born after that. We should remember that one of the premises of cultural transmission is that parental involvement.

How do you see this theory reflected in your language learning experience?

 When we started to learn the language, we were surrounded by professors and other students who managed the language in a better way than we used to do. The theory of Transformational Generative Grammar was present in our process of language learning.

We were able to manage grammatical rules in a certain way. For example, whenever we said: “I cutted the paper in half” (the irregularity of verbs), “Professor Ana teach in our classroom” (the use of third person in verbs), “I think that exam is more easy than the other” (the rules of the comparative in short and long words). We managed the rules of grammar in our own way, applying some kind of logical thinking.

Also we were able to generate brand new sentences that we never heard or said before.