Noam Chomsky

Some concepts and consequences of the theory of government and binding

Noam Chomsky, more than any other researcher, has radically restructured the study of human language over the past several decades. While the study of government and binding is an outgrowth of Chomskys earlier work in transformational grammar, it represents a significant shift in focus and a new direction of investigation into the fundamentals of linguistic theory.This monograph consolidates and extends this new approach. It serves as a concise introduction to government-binding theory, applies it to several new domains of empirical data, and proposes some revisions to the principles of the theory that lead to greater unification, descriptive scope, and explanatory depth.Earlier work in the theory of grammar was concerned primarily with rule systems. The accent in government-binding theory, however, is on systems of principles of universal grammar. In the course of this book, Chomsky proposes and evaluates various general principles that limit and constrain the types of rules that are possible, and the ways they interact and function. In particular, he proposes that rule systems are in fact highly restricted in variety: only a finite number of grammars are attainable in principle, and these fall into a limited set of types.Another consequence of this shift in focus is the change of emphasis from derivations to representations. The major topic in the study of syntactic representations is the analysis of empty categories, which is a central theme of the book. After his introductory comments and a chapter on the variety of rule system, Chomsky takes up, in turn, the general properties of empty categories, the functional determination of empty categories, parasitic gaps, and binding theory and the typology of empty categories.Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor at MIT. The book is the sixth in the series Linguistic Inquiry Monographs, edited by Samuel Jay Keyser.

On Certain Formal Properties of Grammars

A grammar can be regarded as a device that enumerates the sentences of a language. We study a sequence of restrictions that limit grammars first to Turing machines, then to two types of system from which a phrase structure description of the generated language can be drawn, and finally to finite state Markov sources (finite automata). These restrictions are shown to be increasingly heavy in the sense that the languages that can be generated by grammars meeting a given restriction constitute a proper subset of those that can be generated by grammars meeting the preceding restriction. Various formulations of phrase structure description are considered, and the source of their excess generative power over finite state sources is investigated in greater detail.

Three Factors in Language Design

The biolinguistic perspective regards the language faculty as an organ of the body, along with other cognitive systems. Adopting it, we expect to find three factors that interact to determine (I-) languages attained: genetic endowment (the topic of Universal Grammar), experience, and principles that are language- or even organism-independent. Research has naturally focused on I-languages and UG, the problems of descriptive and explanatory adequacy. The Principles-and-Parameters approach opened the possibility for serious investigation of the third factor, and the attempt to account for properties of language in terms of general considerations of computational efficiency, eliminating some of the technology postulated as specific to language and providing more principled explanation of linguistic phenomena

The Algebraic Theory of Context-Free Languages*

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the several classes of sentence-generating devices that are closely related, in various ways, to the grammars of both natural languages and artificial languages of various kinds. By a language it simply mean a set of strings in some finite set V of symbols called the vocabulary of the language. By a grammar a set of rules that give a recursive enumeration of the strings belonging to the language. It can be said that the grammar generates these strings. The chapter discusses the aspect of the structural description of a sentence, namely, its subdivision into phrases belonging to various categories. A major concern of the general theory of natural languages is to define the class of possible strings; the class of possible grammars; the class of possible structural descriptions; a procedure for assigning structural descriptions to sentences, given a grammar; and to do all of this in such a way that the structural description assigned to a sentence by the grammar of a natural language will provide the basis for explaining how a speaker of this language would understand this sentence.

Filters and Control

The questions that we want to consider here have arisen in a number of different contexts in recent work on the nature and use of language. Among these are the following: (1)a. Restricting the options for transformational grammar (TG) (discussed in section 1.1 below); b. Perceptual strategies and syntactic rules (section 1.2); c. Problems of obligatory control (section 1.3); d. Properties of the complementizer system (section 1.4).

Finite state languages

A finite state language is a finite or infinite set of strings (sentences) of symbols (words) generated by a finite set of rules (the grammar), where each rule specifies the state of the system in which it can be applied, the symbol which is generated, and the state of the system after the rule is applied. A number of equivalent descriptions of finite state languages are explored. A simple structural characterization theorem for finite state languages is established, based on the cyclical structure of the grammar. It is shown that the complement of any finite state language formed on a given vocabulary of symbols is also a finite state language, and that the union of any two finite state languages formed on a given vocabulary is a finite state language; i.e., the set of all finite state languages that can be formed on a given vocabulary is a Boolean algebra. Procedures for calculating the number of grammatical strings of any given length are also described.

Evolution, brain, and the nature of language

Language serves as a cornerstone for human cognition, yet much about its evolution remains puzzling. Recent research on this question parallels Darwins attempt to explain both the unity of all species and their diversity. What has emerged from this research is that the unified nature of human language arises from a shared, species-specific computational ability. This ability has identifiable correlates in the brain and has remained fixed since the origin of language approximately 100 thousand years ago. Although songbirds share with humans a vocal imitation learning ability, with a similar underlying neural organization, language is uniquely human.

Some controversial questions in phonological theory

In the first issue of this journal, Fred W. Householder discussed two papers of ours which he found defective in various respects. We feel that the issues involved are important and deserve the fullest clarification. We will therefore discuss Householders objections and the underlying issues in some detail, reiterating points that have been made in the aforementioned papers and elsewhere and making no attempt to avoid redundancy if this can contribute to clarity.

The mystery of language evolution

Understanding the evolution of language requires evidence regarding origins and processes that led to change. In the last 40 years, there has been an explosion of research on this problem as well as a sense that considerable progress has been made. We argue instead that the richness of ideas is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved. We show that, to date, (1) studies of nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological capacity; (2) the fossil and archaeological evidence does not inform our understanding of the computations and representations of our earliest ancestors, leaving details of origins and selective pressure unresolved; (3) our understanding of the genetics of language is so impoverished that there is little hope of connecting genes to linguistic processes any time soon; (4) all modeling attempts have made unfounded assumptions, and have provided no empirical tests, thus leaving any insights into languages origins unverifiable. Based on the current state of evidence, we submit that the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever, with considerable uncertainty about the discovery of either relevant or conclusive evidence that can adjudicate among the many open hypotheses. We conclude by presenting some suggestions about possible paths forward.

How could language have evolved

How could language have evolved? What is the key innovation underlying the evolution of human language? This Essay argues that the ability to “merge” two syntactic elements uniquely explains the recentness and stability of language. [SK to check before publishing on the homepage] CM 16/7