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Motorcycle Book Store > Motorcycle books beginning with L
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Language and Mind |
Author: Noam Chomsky
Published: 2006-01-30 |
List price: $26.99
Our price: $17.81
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As of: November 21st, 2008 02:49:15 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 not for the curious amateur
I'm a scientist with a background in (analytic) philosophy, and am used to technical writing and complex ideas; I picked up this book on John Searle's recommendation in an article in the New York Review of Books. I don't know what Searle was thinking; I found these lectures impenetrable.
Chomsky's examples are far from illuminating and get bogged down in details -- examples of phonological or syntactical transformations involve piles upon piles of poorly introduced material, and it's frustrating to get a page and a half through some dense presentation only to discover that he then invokes some principle you've never heard of and he doesn't explain. It's claimed that these lectures are for a "general" audience, which I think must mean "a general audience of linguists".
I came out the other end with barely more understanding of Chomsky's linguistics than I did coming in -- after many hours of trying to parse his rather tortured prose.
I do not recommend this book to someone outside linguistics trying to get a feel for things like universal grammar and innate structures. There is some interesting material (on things like innate knowledge and the history of philosophy) that isn't compromised by Chomsky's poor sense of audience -- but it's not particularly well organized, and I'm sure there must be better coverage elsewhere, in or out of Chomsky's oeuvre.
 Essential Chomsky
It's a basic text for the students of social sciences, though not for beginers.
 Relatively accessible foothold to an earth-shaking analytic thinker and creative, imaginative genius.
Chomsky can be anesthetizing as a lecturer, so a brief appetizer such as this collection of essays should be chosen ahead of any visual or aural recordings. Don't expect complete clarity, full explanations, or satisfying closure, but do expect provocative insights and deeply resonating ideas that take us ever closer to the center of human consciousness without the religious-mystical jargon. He and Jacques Derrida practically share honors as the two most important thinkers of the last half of the preceding century.
At a time when the rage is "diversity," "multi-culturalism," sectarianism, Balkanization, inviolable walls and boundaries, whether for protection or transgression, both thinkers trace the source of such reductive constructions to linguistic impoverishment, whether externally or internally imposed. Moreover, both offer avenues out of the fixed, repressive syntax and limited, distorted semantics that amount to denials of human birthrights and potentials--God-given or otherwise. Whereas Derrida concentrates on the effects, a close reading of Chomsky will disclose that his actual object is their source, the originating organ itself. In his linguistic theory as well as his politics, the "deep structural" archetypal odyssey is ultimately of the subject seeking to understand itself better as object, of mind in pursuit of itself.
Recommended for college libraries and language studies shelves
Now in an updated third edition, Language and Mind presents Linguistics Professor Noam Chomsky's groundbreaking classic essays on linguistic theory. First published in the 1960s, Language and Mind includes the essays "Form and meaning in natural languages"; "The formal nature of language"; "Linguistics and philosophy"; and "Biolinguistics and the human capacity". An index rounds out this scholarly, heavily researched and annotated dissertation of the nuances of long-standing linguistic theoretical questions, problems, discoveries and issues, recommended for college libraries and language studies shelves.
 Chomsky's minimalist project: can it get smaller?
This work covers Chomsky's theory of the nature of language over the last 50 years, bringing it up to date with a new chapter on his latest ideas. Chomsky still thinks that all languages are governed by a universal grammar that is connected with our genes. He still says that infants understand grammar and work out which language they are learning. The latest development of his theory, referred to in this work, is called the "minimalist project". It is based on faith: the theory is bound to be right, therefore it would work in practice, but we're not going to do that as it would be too complicated.
So, for Chomsky, grammar is still a part of biology, rather than a set of abstract terms, and meanings are still hiding somewhere in sentences a bit like phlogiston in combustible materials. The Chomskyans actually believe sentences contain their meanings, but the only real form of the meanings of sentences lies in electrochemical events in our brains, and you're not going to be able to analyse one of those and say it's the meaning of the sentence "Let's go to the bookshop." The meanings of sentences, in terms of concepts, are not objectively discoverable. Since therefore there is no objectively definable relationship between the form of any sentence and what it means, a scientific approach to grammar, in the style of Chomsky, is a non-starter. Better to read Wittgenstein, who says that sentences do not contain their meanings, but only express them.
Chomskyan linguistics is an odd phenomenon that has some parallels in academic history. It is completely wrong, yet became fashionable, at least in some anglophone countries. It was and is the sole concern in the professional lives of many academics. So it is dying with difficulty, since so much is invested in it. Yet dying it is. Did it do any damage? Yes. Those who were persuaded by Chomsky's theories that language was something it is not had a wrong view not only of language and how to treat it, but also of themselves and of others as language-users, and thus as human beings, since language is so much a part of our humanity.
The publicity for this edition underwent a change. To start with, it advertised "two brand-new chapters", and you still find that in some advertisements. Later it became "an additional chapter". For this new edition, Chomsky sent two articles that had already been published elsewhere in 2005 and were available gratis on the Internet, one of which repeated verbatim three quarters of the other. The publishers discarded one of them.
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