2. Introduction
“It takes a big ego to withstand the
fact that you’re saying something
different from everyone else.”
Chomsky (qt in Smith, 2004).
3. Outline
• Introduction
• Chomsky’ s Life
• Background
• Chomsky’s Critique to Skinner’s Model
• Language and Mind
• Transformational Generative Grammar
• Implications for Education
• Conclusion
4. Chomsky …. The Man
• December 7, 1928: Chomsky was born.
• From the age of two, he spent ten years in a progressive Deweyite school in
Philadelphia, where there was a congenial emphasis on individual creativity.
• He attended the University of Pennsylvania where he met Zellig Harris
• 1949: He graduated with a BA. His thesis was about Modern Hebrew. He
entered graduate school.
• 1951: He became one of the Society of Fellows at Harvard, from where he
moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955.
• He has been repeatedly jailed for political activism. (Smith, 2004).
• He has been influenced by a large variety of thinkers, philosophers, politicians
and linguists.
• Many compare him to Bertrand Russel.
5. Chomsky: …. The Revolution
• Chomsky made a resurrection to innateness.
• He has returned the mind to its position of preeminence in the study of
humankind.
• The idea that a substantial part of our knowledge is genetically
determined came forward.
• ‘‘He has shown that there is really only one human language: that the
immense complexity of the innumerable languages we hear around us
must be variations on a single theme. He has revolutionized linguistics,
and in so doing has set a cat among the philosophical pigeons.” (Smith,
2004: 16).
• Since 1957, syntax and cognition have become the pace-maker in
theoretical linguistics rather than phonology.
6. Background
• Before the 1960s, the structuralist Model was very
dominant. It was simply descriptive of the different
levels of production, namely: phonology, morphology,
syntax and semantics.
• It did not provide any model or frame work for
understanding how the actual learning takes place.
• In the late 1950s, Skinner constructed his cognitive
learning model: behaviorism which correlates with the
notion.
Stimulus → response→ reinforcement
and habit formation
• According to Skinner, children learn the language by
imitating and repeating and the mind is a blank slate at
birth.
7. Chomsky’s Critique to Skinner’s Model
Although children hear only a finite number of
sentences, they are able to produce an infinite
number of possible sentences with no
previous formal training or correction.
8. Poverty of the stimulus
• Chomskyan syntax: more complex than people had
previously thought syntax to be!
• The grammar of a sentence can’t be deduced from
its surface form
– The schoolchildren were difficult to teach
– The schoolchildren were eager to learn
• So environmental language data is insufficient:
grammar can’t be learned from it
9. Chomsky’s Critique to Skinner’s Model
Constraints and principles cannot be learnt:
• Children learn their first or second language at an early
age.
• They learn, for example, single word formation at the
age one, and learn the basic grammar around age six.
• At this age, no one has the cognitive ability to
understand the principles of grammar as a system, but
because some innate capacity, is still capable of using
it.
• Put it differently, children do not know anything about
grammar or syntax but still they can produce
grammatical sentences in most of the time.
10. Chomsky’s Critique to Skinner’s Model
3. Patterns of development are universal.
• When children develop their language, they
learn the various aspects of language in a very
similar order.
• If children only learned what they are taught,
the order of what they learned would vary in
different environments.
e.g.: Brown Model 1973:
11. Creativity
• Language is CREATIVE
– We can produce and understand an infinite range
of novel grammatical sentences
– Children do not imitate a fixed repertoire of
sentences
• Chomsky: creativity is not explicable if
language is learnt just from the environment
12. Degeneracy of the data
• The child’s language data is degenerate
• Ungrammatical utterances are frequent and
are not marked out as “wrong”
• Therefore it is impossible to deduce the
grammar of a language, if your only input data
is utterances from the environment
13. Language Acquisition Device
• L.A.D is a function of the brain that is specifically for learning language. It is an
innate biological function of human beings just like learning to walk.
• L.A.D plays two roles in Chomskyan theory:
• 1. It accounts for the striking similarities among human languages.
e.g.: the similarity in using relative clause constructions from English, French and
Arabic.
• A. English: a- the man that I saw was your brother
b- I read the book that you read.
• B. French: a- L’homme que j’ai vu était ton frère.
b- J’ai lu le livre que tu as lu.
• C. Arabic : a- r-raʒulu l-ladi: ra ?eit kan axuk.
b- 9ara?to lkita:b l-ladi: 9ara?ta.
• 2. It accounts for the speed, ease and regularity with which children learn their
first language.
• If the sequence order is the same in all children, it is then quite normal to speak
about language universals.
14. Evidence from Creoles
• Pidgin: simple language that arise in contact
situations
• Creole: a fully complex language descended
from a pidgin
• The grammar of a Creole is created by children
as they learn it
• This is evidence that this grammar comes from
some innate source
15. Universals
• Human languages exhibit remarkable similarities or principles. These
patterns are called universals.
• We can find these similarities on many linguistic levels:
• 1. Phonological universals: Consonants, for example, are distinguished also
according to the location of their production, that is, after the various
organs of the vocal tract. With the help of this detailed information we can
now refer to every consonant by its location and manner of articulation;
[f], for example, is a voiceless, labiodentals fricative.
• 2. Syntactic universals: Also, most of existing languages have verbs,
nouns, adjectives and pronouns.
• 3. Semantic universals: One semantic universal regards our notion of color.
There exist eleven basic color terms: black, white, red, green, blue, yellow,
brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey.
16. Language as Rule-governed System
• We may need to look at these examples
which in some way show that the speakers
of language often behave as if their
language is rule-governed.
• The thought of those poor children were
really …WAS really...bothering me.
• Even though they told me to, I didn’t sit
down and wasn’t quit…Was quite …I mean I
didn’t sit down and I wasn’t quite.
• Ze pound are worthless = the pound is
worthless.
• The speaker who is ready to correct
themselves and others gives evidence that
there is a right and wrong way of saying
things. This assumption that speakers know
the grammar of a language is a claim that
these grammars are psychologically real.
The question that is to be raised here is:
how do we come up to know this
knowledge of language?
Claiming that language is rule-
governed system is like claiming
that language is definable in
terms of grammar.
Grammar is a
set of rules that
have two tasks:
Separating grammatical
from ungrammatical
sentences.
Providing a description
each of the grammatical
sentences, stating how they
should be pronounced and
what they mean.
17. Intuitions
• Linguistic knowledge of language lies well beyond the level of
consciousness. One way of investigating this knowledge is to ask
speakers of a language for their judgments about sentences of their
language: not directly but indirectly.
• Ask them, for example, about the grammaticality or
ungrammaticality of certain sentences.
• There are some difficulties in deciding on how much reliance should
be put on speakers’ intuitions.
e.g.: a- I like Indians without reservations.
b- I have no reservations in my liking for Indians.
c- I like Indians who don’t live on reservations
• this is to argue a certain distinction should be made between the
speaker’s perceptual or understanding abilities (performance) and
his actual knowledge of the language performance.
18. Competence and Performance
• “competence is knowledge of language. That part of our knowledge which
is exclusively linguistic. It includes knowledge of the vocabulary, of
phonology, of syntax, and of semantics. The part of such knowledge which
is different from language to language is learnt; the part which is universal
is innate.”
• “Performance is the use of language in speaking and understanding
utterances is linguistic performance. Performance is dependent on one’s
linguistic knowledge (competence) and in part on non-linguistic
knowledge of an encyclopedia or cultural kind, as well as on extraneous
factors as mood, tiredness and so on”
Neil, S, Dreidre, W.(1990) Modern Linguistics
• The distinction between performance and competence (grammaticality
and acceptability) is distinction between sentence and utterance.
a. Sentences are abstract objects which not tied to a particular context,
speaker or time of utterance. They are tied to a particular grammar.
b. Utterances are datable events, tied to a particular speaker, occasions,
and context.
19. Competence and Performance
• There are some utterances which could never be a
grammatical sentence, but still they are acceptable.
• e.g.
• John’s being a real idiot-I suppose cela va sans dire-kolshi
3arafha.
• On the other hand, there some grammatical sentences
which can never be realized as fully acceptable utterances
because their semantic, syntactic or phonological content.
• e.g.:
1.we finally sent Edinburgh man, for for four Forfar men to
go would have seemed like favoritism.
2. If because when Mary came in John left Harry cried, I’d
be surprised.
3. The colorless green idea sleeps calmly in my head.
20. Scientific Evaluation of Grammar
• žInadequacy of corpora lead Chomsky to reconsider the
theoretical approach to data analysis.
• A linguistic theory explains rather than describes grammars:
• Observationally adequate: It accounts for all the observed
(corpus/performance) data.
• Descriptively adequate: It accounts for
observations and acceptability judgements (competence), and
generalizations .
• Explanatorily adequate: It accounts for observations,
acceptability, and language acquisition.
21. Transformational generative grammar
• What is a sentence? A hierarchicaly organized structure of
words that maps sound to meaning and vice versa.
• What is grammar? A set of rules. It is a cognitive structure or
the part of the mind that generates and understands language.
• What is syntax? The scientific study of sentence structure. It is
the psychological or cognitive sentence structure in the mind.
• Sentences consist of structured words.
22. Phrase Structure Grammar
• We speak about the language in terms of phrases and
constituents.
• Phrase structure doesn’t account for all the language.
• Chomsky remarks that: ‘‘ notions of phrase structure are quite
adequate for a small part of the language and that the rest of
the language can be derived by repeated application of a
rather simple set of transformations to the strings given by
the phrase structure grammar.” (qt in Smith, 2004).
• Constituent: A sentence embedded into another
• Matrix: A sentence into which another is embedded.
• This grammar is both transformational and generative.
23. Transformations
• H. Robins in his General Linguistics describes a transformation
as ‘‘a method of stating how the structures of many sentences
in languages can be generated or explained formally as the
result of specific transformations applied to certain basic
sentence structures.” (qt in Smith: 2004).
• žThe kernel is the basic phrase from which transformations
start.
24. Deep structure surface structure
• Deep structure: the aspect of syntactic
structure operated on by semantics for the
purpose of semantic interpretation
• Surface structure: the aspect of syntactic
structure operated on by phonology for the
purpose of phonetic interpretation.
25. The Generative Aspects
• A grammar is to generate all and only the grammatical sentences of a
language.
• The grammar must be so designed that by following its rules and
conventions we can produce all or any of the possible sentences of
the language.
• To generate is to predict or specify precisely what are the possible
sentences of the language.
• Thus a grammar should `generate', `specify', and `predict' sentences
such as:
• He is waiting for the bus.
• but not * waiting he is for the bus, or * He the bus is waiting for.
• There is concern with potential utterances.
26. To generate a sentence like `A man read the book’
1. S---------NP + VP
2. VP---------V + NP
3. NP---------D + N
4. V--------- read
5.Det---------a, the
6. N---------man, book
If we apply the rules in sequence, we generate the following strings successively:
S
NP + VP
NP + V + NP
Det + N + V + Det + N
Det + N + read + Det + N
A man read the book.
We can indicate optional elements by the use of brackets. Thus the string can be rewritten as:
NP---Det (adj) + N.
We can now generate such sentences as:
A tall man read the short book.
27. Infinity
Any corpus has a finite number of sentences, no matter how
large, yet a language consists of an infinite number of sentences.
This infinity is a result of `recursion‘: We can apply the same
linguistic device over and over again. For example,
Those are the books that Rachid bought.
Those are the two thinkers who wrote the books that Rachid
bought.
Those are the cars that belong to the two thinkers who wrote the
books that Rachid bought.
We can contrive ad infinitum.
28. Implications for education
• Language acquisition and learning become
differentiated.
• A child learning language simply does not have the
enough evidence to enable it to learn the relevant
principles from scratch.
• Language develops with the mind.
• Nature and nurture go together.
• Mental lexicon, mental structures and and
schemata can enhance language learning.
• TPR wanes down.
29. Conclusion
• It is difficult to summarize the vast output and prolific
career of Chomsky. . He has revolutionized modern
linguistics as well as other disciplines including Computer
Science, psychology , philosophy , anthropology and politics
.
• His students have contributed vividly to many other areas
• Chomsky’s most recent work includes his continued
contributions to linguistics (in particular new developments
in the Minimalist Program), his further discussion on
evolution, and his extensive work on the events of
September 11, 2001 and their aftermath.
