The paper for this week is a review of Chomsky’s linguistics that appeared
in the New York Review written by the philosopher John Searle. The essay is
online here:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10142.
Thank Shreeharsh for introducing a good reading material. The review is long, which briefly gives an overview of Chomsky's main ideas and contributions. Searle discusses Chomsky from three aspects: his shifting paradigm in linguistic, his methodology of generative grammar, and his philosophy of innate syntactical structure in human mind. From Searle's well-written article, we see a big jump Chomsky has made--he showed the gap between symbol and meaning so that structural linguists cannot reach a deep understanding of language, and the way he bridged the gap has been criticized by his disciples. As the author points out, there exist limitation in Chomsky's methodology and misconception in his philosophy. This article has revealed a fantastic and never ended intellectual revolution about Chomsky and others.
No comments:
Post a Comment