Five minutes with Noam Chomsky – “Europe is pretty much following behind US policy, no matter what that policy is”

Last week the General Assembly of the United Nations voted in favour of recognising Palestine as a non-member observer state. The EU was unable to reach a common position on the issue, with some states voting in favour and others, including Germany and the United Kingdom, abstaining. EUROPP editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson asked Noam Chomsky for his views on the vote and Europe’s wider response to the Israel-Palestine crisis

The language capacity: architecture and evolution

There is substantial evidence that the human language capacity (LC) is a species-specific biological property, essentially unique to humans, invariant among human groups, and dissociated from other cognitive systems. Each language, an instantiation of LC, consists of a generative procedure that yields a discrete infinity of hierarchically structured expressions with semantic interpretations, hence a kind of “language of thought” (LOT), along with an operation of externalization (EXT) to some sensory-motor system, typically sound. There is mounting evidence that generation of LOT observes language-independent principles of computational efficiency and is based on the simplest computational operations, and that EXT is an ancillary process not entering into the core semantic properties of LOT and is the primary locus of the apparent complexity, diversity, and mutability of language. These conclusions are not surprising, since the internal system is acquired virtually without evidence in fundamental respects, and EXT relates it to sensory-motor systems that are unrelated to it. Even such properties as the linear order of words appear to be reflexes of the sensory motor system, not available to generation of LOT. The limited evidence from the evolutionary record lends support to these conclusions, suggesting that LC emerged with Homo sapiens or not long after, and has not evolved since human groups dispersed

Choices and Prospects

Excerpt In examining the attacks on the U.S. on September 11, we must first identity the perpetrators of the crimes. It is generally assumed, plausibly, that their origin is the Middle East region, and that the attacks probably trace back to the Osama Bin Laden network, a widespread and complex organization, doubtless inspired by Bin Laden but not necessarily acting under his control. Let us assume that this is true. A sensible person would try to ascertain Bin Laden’s views, and the sentiments of the large reservoir of supporters of much of what he says throughout the region. About all of this, we have a great deal of information

An interview on linguistic variation with Noam Chomsky

This is an interview to Noam Chomsky (MIT) on linguistic variation

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

Some Puzzling Foundational Issues : the Reading Program

This is an annotated transcription of Noam Chomsky's keynote presentation at the University of Reading, in May 2017. Here, Chomsky reviews some foundational aspects of the theory of structure building: essentially, Merge and Label. The aim is to eliminate what he refers to as extensions of Merge which are seemingly incompatible with the Strong Minimalist Thesis while still accounting for recursive structure, displacement, and reconstruction (as the main empirical goals of the Minimalist Program). These include sidewards movement, multi-dominance, and late- Merge; all of which have been developed throughout the life cycle of transformational generative grammar. Furthermore, Chomsky formulates a series of conditions that an adequate formulation of Merge must meet, and sketches how the aforementioned extensions may violate these conditions. Chomsky arrives at a formulation of an operation MERGE, which maintains the core properties of Merge but is further restricted by limitations over what MERGE can do to the workspaces where syntactic operations apply.Aquesta és una transcripció anotada de la presentació principal de Noam Chomsky a la Universitat de Reading, el maig de 2017. Aquí Chomsky revisa alguns aspectes fundacionals de la teoria de la construcció d'estructures: fonamentalment, fusió i etiquetatge. L'objectiu és eliminar allò que aquest autor anomena extensions de fusió, que aparentment són incompatibles amb la tesi minimalista forta, i continuar donant compte de l'estructura recursiva, el desplaçament i la reconstrucció (com a principals objectius empírics del programa minimalista). Aquests inclouen el moviment lateral, la multidominància i la fusió tardana, que s'han desenvolupat al llarg del cicle de vida de la gramàtica generativa transformacional. A més a més, Chomsky formula una sèrie de condicions que ha de complir una formulació adequada de fusió i indica que les extensions esmentades poden violar aquestes condicions. Chomsky arriba a la formulació d'una operació fusió que manté les propietats bàsiques de fusió però que queda restringida per limitacions sobre el que la fusió pot fer en els espais de treball on s'apliquen les operacions sintàctiques

Mental Representations

Knowledge of language (and probably much else) can properly be regarded as a system of mental representations and operations to form and modify them. In these terms, many problems concerning language and knowledge can be reasonably approached, sometimes solved, though many mysteries remain, and prospects are opened to incorporate this inquiry within the natural sciences