Tracing the development of linguistic theory from Descartes to Wilhelm von Humboldt, Chomsky's book is one of the most original and profound studies of language and mind ever written. This third edition includes a new and specially written introduction by James McGilvray, contextualising the work for the twenty-first century.
In this extraordinarily original and profound work, Noam Chomsky discusses themes in the study of language and mind since the end of the sixteenth century in order to explain the motivations and methods that underlie his work in linguistics, the science of mind, and even politics. This edition includes a new and specially written introduction by James McGilvray, contextualising the work for the twenty-first century. It has been made more accessible to a larger audience; all the French and German in the original edition has been translated, and the notes and bibliography have been brought up to date. The relationship between the original edition (published in 1966) and contemporary biolinguistic work is also explained. This challenging volume is an important contribution to the study of language and mind, and to the history of these studies since the end of the sixteenth century.
As James McGilvray remarks in his introduction to this new edition of Cartesian Linguistics, the book was largely ignored and indeed denounced when first published in 1966. One likely reason why the first edition was ignored is that it contained many untranslated quotations from French and German authors. For this new edition these passages have all been translated into English. Perhaps the main reason why it was denounced is that Cartesian Linguistics contains, implicitly if not explicitly, trenchant criticisms of empiricist theories about linguistics and the mind. Due largely to Chomsky's efforts, these are not so dominant now as they were when the first edition appeared in 1966, although they still command the attention of researchers and the public imagination. In his introduction Professor McGilvray focuses on the contrast between rationalist and empiricist approaches to language and the mind. He discusses at length the two most distinctive features of what he calls Chomsky's "rationalist-romantic" approach: its emphasis on linguistic creativity and its insistence that this creativity can be explained only by assuming that humans are endowed with innate concepts and mental faculties. In the course of the discussion he connects Chomsky's early treatment of these themes with his later development of them, and with Chomsky's well-known views on politics and education.
The fact that one would contemplate publication of a book such as this indicates both the maturity and the growth of activity that have taken place in the field of psycholinguistics over the past few decades. More over, the fact that psycholinguists and/or scholars of the history of ideas are interested in the history of their subject clearly demonstrates that much has been accomplished, and the time is indeed ripe for the reassess ment of whence we have come. In addition, perhaps this interest in our historical past suggests that psycholinguistics is at a critical stage in its development. There are many scholars who believe that this critical stage manifests itself primarily in a search for a new paradigm. It would seem only reasonable to suggest that when members of a profession are search ing for something new, more than likely they will take time to reflect on the past in the hope that it will facilitate the fulfillment of their quest. This book as such reflects a wide-ranging search for historical roots over a millenium of research in the psychology of language and thought. Furthermore, it also reflects an attempt to open the context by introducing the broader perspectives of the history of ideas and the history of science together with their reassessment of the method of science motivated from within psychology itself.
The book evaluates Noam Chomsky's contributions to linguistics and focuses on the historic justification for Cartesian Linguistics, the evolution of Chomsky's theorizing, empirical language acquisition work, and computational modeling of language learning. It is shown that calling Chomsky's linguistic Cartesian cannot be historically justified.
Elementary set theory accustoms the students to mathematical abstraction, includes the standard constructions of relations, functions, and orderings, and leads to a discussion of the various orders of infinity. The material on logic covers not only the standard statement logic and first-order predicate logic but includes an introduction to formal systems, axiomatization, and model theory. The section on algebra is presented with an emphasis on lattices as well as Boolean and Heyting algebras. Background for recent research in natural language semantics includes sections on lambda-abstraction and generalized quantifiers. Chapters on automata theory and formal languages contain a discussion of languages between context-free and context-sensitive and form the background for much current work in syntactic theory and computational linguistics. The many exercises not only reinforce basic skills but offer an entry to linguistic applications of mathematical concepts. For upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in theoretical linguistics, computer-science students with interests in computational linguistics, logic programming and artificial intelligence, mathematicians and logicians with interests in linguistics and the semantics of natural language.
This book discusses how scholars in the west have conceived that human languages share important properties, and how westerners have understood the nature of second or foreign language learning.