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| The Biology of the Language Faculty: Its Perfection, Past and Future |
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SPEAKER:
Noam Chomsky
Institute Professor; Professor of Linguistics
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ABOUT THE LECTURE:
Noam Chomsky, around whose work much of the Syntax series revolves, gives listeners a glimpse into the evolution of his own thinking, with an emphasis on areas of linguistics where computational considerations play a major role.
Chomsky briefly outlines the key components of a biologically based linguistics that began to emerge 50 years ago: first, a genetic language endowment (Universal Grammar), which interacts with the external environment, and second, the individual’s development and learning strategies. While UG has been called “controversial,” says Chomsky, the “alternative is magic,” since something has to account for the fact that “my granddaughter picked out part of her environment as language related, and almost reflexively developed a language while her pet kitten, a chimp or songbird, exposed to exactly the same data, didn’t take the first step and couldn’t conceivably take the second.”
Chomsky links a third factor of language involving architecture and the principles underlying data acquisition to natural laws that may apply generally in biology, and not specifically to language. Research suggests that between 50 and 100 thousand years ago, humans made an abrupt evolutionary leap forward in cognitive capacity. Language seems to have emerged at this time. While long-term evolution can lead to great complexity, a sudden leap like this, says Chomsky, tends to yield something “simple, almost perfect -- a perfect solution to design problems imposed by circumstances and conditions prevailing at the time of emergence...” This proposal has been dubbed the Strong Minimalist Theory (SMT), and offers a plausible approach to studying the complexity of language, believes Chomsky. It might prove profitable to “examine the range of phenomena that fall under what’s loosely called language,” and try to “disentangle them so some parts of them conform more or less to SMT.” And here, says Chomsky, issues of computational efficiency play perhaps an overwhelming role.
Chomsky links SMT to transformational grammar, a long-standing component of his linguistic theory. He states that “a simple form of transformational grammar is just the optimal system, and if you don’t have it, you’d have to have an argument as to why you don’t.” Well-designed systems should have simple, sensible properties. He recommends “chipping away at the stipulated properties of Universal Grammar, and technologies proposed to deal with particular problems to see how closely you can show that language does approximate to the perfect design that would be a natural expectation in light of what appears to be evolutionary history.”
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Noam Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. A brief sampling of his prolific work includes: The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory; Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; Language and Mind; American Power and the New Mandarins; Reflections on Language; Rules and Representations; Knowledge of Language; The Culture of Terrorism; Manufacturing Consent (with E.S. Herman); Understanding Power; Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance; and most recently, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World, (with David Barsamian).
Chomsky received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. During the years 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford; in January 1970 he delivered the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at Cambridge University; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, and in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, among many others.
Chomsky has received honorary degrees from universities around the world, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science.
Noam Chomsky at MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
The Official Noam Chomsky website
A Noam Chomsky Archive on Znet
NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 1:00:01.
Noam Chomsky begins with no introduction.
At 50:30, Chomsky takes questions.
The information on this page was accurate as of the day the video was added to MIT World. This video was added to MIT World on 2008-01-17.
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