Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought Author: Noam Chomsky | Language: English | ISBN:
0521708176 | Format: EPUB
Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought Description
In this extraordinarily original and profound work, Noam Chomsky discusses themes in the study of language and mind since the end of the sixteenth century in order to explain the motivations and methods that underlie his work in linguistics, the science of mind, and even politics. This edition includes a new and specially written introduction by James McGilvray, contextualising the work for the twenty-first century. It has been made more accessible to a larger audience; all the French and German in the original edition has been translated, and the notes and bibliography have been brought up to date. The relationship between the original edition (published in 1966) and contemporary biolinguistic work is also explained. This challenging volume is an important contribution to the study of language and mind, and to the history of these studies since the end of the sixteenth century.
- Paperback: 164 pages
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 3rd edition (March 2, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0521708176
- ISBN-13: 978-1107674691
- Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
This is a great book for someone who is interested in how Chomsky's theory of language acquisition and syntax are influenced by a series of philosophers from Descartes to Humboldt, which Chomsky calls the "Cartesian Linguistics". In fact, I would recommend it to anyone, especially non-linguists, so nobody has to be intimidated by a false impression that Cartesian Linguistics is a technical book for professional linguists. Chomsky picks out many interesting philosophical views from Descartes, Post-Royal, Humboldt, and others to give his readers at least three main ideas: First, there were philosophers and linguists before Chomsky who not only anticipated the cognitive revolution but also initiated it before it had to be revived again in the 20th century by Chomsky and others. Second, philosophers such as Descartes, Post-Royale, and Humboldt already knew some properties of language before Chomsky did. Descartes and Humboldt were very much aware of the creative aspect of language to generate an infinite set of sentences arranged in infinite ways that are still grammatical. Post-Royal were implicitly aware of the distinction between surface and deep structure as they point out that an uttered sentence is in fact composed of several propositions that are synthesized by some rule (which Chomsky called Transformational Rules) to get to the surface sentence. Most of these philosophers were also aware that how language is acquired is not through complete learning or by analogy, but rather exposure to some external stimulus that activates innate and universal principles of language. Lastly, Chomsky tries to argue how the past linguistic tradition (Cartesian Linguistics) is still very valuable, important, and relevant to modern linguistics.
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