Chomsky's Angels
This blog contains all the topics seen in class. Also contains some activities you can realize related to such topics.
sábado, 25 de mayo de 2013
Chomskyan Formalism
Born
in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928, Noam Chomsky was an intellectual prodigy
who went on to earn a PhD in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Since 1955, he has been a professor at MIT and has produced groundbreaking,
controversial theories on human linguistic capacity. Chomsky is widely
published, both on topics in his field and on issues of dissent and U.S.
foreign policy.
Early
life
Noam
Chomsky was a brilliant child, and his curiosities and intellect were kindled
greatly by his early experiences. Born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928,
Chomsky felt the weight of America's Great Depression. By the age of 10, while attending a
progressive school that emphasized student self-actualization, Chomsky had
written a student newspaper editorial on the rise of fascism in Europe after
the Spanish Civil War. Amazingly, his story was substantially researched enough
to be the basis for a later essay he would present at New York University.
Chomsky’s
current political views spring from this type of lived-experience stance,
positing that all people can understand politics and economics and make their
own decisions, and that authority ought to be tested before being deemed
legitimate and worthy of power.
Undergraduate
Just
as World War II was coming to a close, Chomsky began his studies at the
University of Pennsylvania. He found little use for his classes until he met
Zellig S. Harris, an American scholar touted for discovering structural
linguistics (breaking language down into distinct parts or levels). Chomsky was
moved by what he felt language could reveal about society. Harris introduced
Chomsky to Nathan Fine, a Harvard mathematician, and two philosophers, Nelson
Goodman and Nathan Salmon. Although an industrious student of Goodman, Chomsky
drastically disagreed with his approach. Goodman believed the human mind was a
blank slate, whereas Chomsky believed the basic concepts of language were
innate in every human’s mind and then only influenced by one’s syntactical
environment.
As a
professor, he introduced transformational grammar to the field. His theory
asserts that languages are innate and that the differences we see are only due
to parameters developed over time in our brains, helping to explain why
children are able to learn different languages more easily than adults.
Chomsky
continued at the University of Pennsylvania and executed some of his research
and writing at Harvard University. His dissertation eventually explored several
linguistic ideas he would soon lay out in one of his best-known books on
linguistics,Syntactic Structures (1957).
The formalism of
context-free grammars was developed in the mid-1950s by Noam Chomsky, and also
their classification as a special type of formal grammar (which he called
phrase-structure grammars).
Formal language
theory, the discipline which studies formal grammars and languages, is a branch
of applied mathematics. Its applications are found in theoretical computer
science, theoretical linguistics, formal semantics, mathematical logic, and
other areas.
The linguistic
formalism derived from Chomsky can be characterized by a focus on innate
universal grammar (UG), and a disregard for the role of stimuli. The formalist
propositions regarding innateness and stimuli do fit extensively with the
cognitive opposition to behaviouristic psychology.
domingo, 21 de abril de 2013
Leonard Bloomfield
·
Mentalism
and behaviorism have at least three things to be involved: outside speakers,
inside speakers and speech.
·
Outside
speakers, inside speakers and speech could be discussed as ecological systems,
distinct from each other because of the point of view taken an odd result,
since the need for a point of view should not arise, and the perennial disputes
between rival conceptions would be even more puzzling.
·
Science
itself was of an intellectual, logically deductive enterprise.
·
Mentalism
was clearly out of step with empirical science defined by Positivists.
·
Speech-behavior
is labeled a substitute response to an immediate outside speaker stimulus;
inside speaker also is a substitute stimulus for outside speaker responses
otherwise occasioned by outside speaker stimuli.
·
Speech
is taken to be an objectively observable activity of an organism, a succession
of substitute stimuli and responses.
·
Inside
speaker was seen as really no more than a spatially isolable part of outside
speaker, individually shaped as its own piece of the entire ecology by social
conditioning.
·
Language
con be seen as the totally of mutually effective substitute responses.
·
Mentalism
is dualistic, it recognizes two kinds of data, experience, perception, insight,
causality, evidence, explanation, study goals and methods of study.
·
Behaviorims
is monistic, it admits only a single kind of data, erroneously distinguished by
mentalist into experience, insight, perception, causality.
·
The
literary standard is accessible through general or personal educational effort,
transcends geographic and social barriers, and is used on occasions described
as formal.
·
The
colloquial standard is observed in situations lacking formal behaviors among
observably privileged classes within a larger speech.
·
The
provincial standard is observed among those remote geographically from the
formative environments of cultural centers.
·
Phonetics
demonstrates that actual sounds lack clear-cut phonetic differences, even when
refined discrimination is possible in the laboratory.
·
Contrasts
are differences that count, since a pair of languages might have the same
phonetic inventory, yet be differently structured.
·
Linguistic
form is the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it
calls forth in the hearer.
·
Borrowing
is to provide an objective way of describing linguistic and cultural contact,
influence and evaluation.
lunes, 25 de febrero de 2013
The London School
From t
The London School
From the sixteenth century onwards, England was
remarkable for the extent to which various aspects of ‘practical linguistics’
flourished here.
One consequence of this tradition for the pure
academic discipline of linguistics which emerged in Britain in our own time was
an emphasis on phonetics. Phonetic study in the modern sense was pioneered by
Henry Sweet (1845-1912).
He was actively concerned with systematizing phonetic
transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling
reform. Sweet was among the early advocates of the notion of the phoneme, which
for him was a matter of practical importance as the unit which should be symbolized
in an ideal system of orthography.
Sweet’s general approach to phonetics was continued by
Daniel Jones (1881-1967), who took the subject up as a hobby, suggested to the
authorities of University Collage, London that they ought to consider teaching
the phonetics of French.
Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language
study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing,
and reproducing minute distinctions of speech-sound; he invented the system of
cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription
possible in the case of vowels. Thanks to the traditions established by Sweet
and Jones, the ‘ear-training’ aspect of phonetics plays a large part in
university courses in linguistics in Britain, and British linguistics research
tends to be informed by meticulous attention to phonetic detail.
The man who turned linguistics proper into a
recognized, distinct academic subject in Britain was J.R. Firth (1890-1960).
He, in 1944, became the first Professor of General Linguistics in Great
Britain, in the School of Oriental and African Studies (college of the
University of London).
Firth’s own theorizing concerned mainly phonology and
semantics, which we shall consider in that order.
One of the principal features of Firth’s treatment of
phonology is that it is polysystemic.
Polysystemic principle ignores a generalization about
human language which is valid as a statistical tendency even if not as an
absolute rule. Firth’s theory could be said to meet Chomsky’s goal of providing
simple descriptions for relatively ‘natural’ languages and complex descriptions
for less natural languages.
A Firthian phonological analysis recognizes a number
of ‘systems’ of prosodies operating at various points in structure which
determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized
phonematic units that represent whatever information is left when all the
co-occurrence restrictions between adjacent segments have been abstracted out as
prosodies. The syllable plays an essential role as the domain of a large number
of prosodies.
Also, Firth insisted that sound and meaning in
language were more directly related that they usually taken to be. For Firth, a
phonology was a structure of systems of choices, and systems of choices were
systems of meaning.
To understand Firth’s notion of meaning, we must
examine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowsky (1884-1942).
The most important aspect of Malinowski’s theorizing, as distinct from his
purely ethnographic work, concerned the functioning of language. For
Malinowski’s, to think of language as a ‘means of transfusing ideas from the
head of the speaker to that of the listener’ was a misleading myth; to speak, particularly
in a primitive culture, is not to tell but to do.
Words are tools, and the ‘meaning’ of a tool is its
use.
Malinowski clarifies his idea of meaning by appealing
to a notion of ‘context situation’.
To understand an utterance in an alien language is not
just to equate it with some element of one’s own language but is rather to know
its position in a complex network of sense-relationships which it contracts
with other elements of the alien language.
-London approach to syntax
This draws heavily on Firthian principles which we
have already encountered in connection with phonological analysis, but the
application of these principles to syntax has been carried out by successors of
Firth, notably Michael Hallyday, once Professor of General Linguistics at the
University of Sydney. Syntactic analysis in the London style is commonly called
‘systemic grammar’. A ‘system’ in Firthian language, remember, is a mutually
exclusive options that come into play at some point in a linguistic structure.
This is the clue to London School syntax: like Firthian phonology, it is
primarily concerned with the nature and import of the various choices which one
makes in deciding to utter one particular sentence out of the infinitely
numerous sentences that one’s language makes available.
In a systemic grammar, the central component is a
chart of the full set of choices available in constructing a sentence, with a specification
of the relationships between choices.
So in syntax the London School is more interested in
stating the range of options open to the speaker than in specifying how any
particular set of choices form the range available is realized as a sequence of
words.
Margaret Berry’s introduction to systemic theory makes
the astute point that, while Chomskyan linguistics appeals to the psychologist,
systemic linguistics is more relevant for the sociologist. The sociologist
wants to be able to describe any patterns that emerge in the particular choices
that given types of individual make in given circumstances from the overall
range provided by their language.
Hallyday introduces into syntax
the notions ‘rank’ and ‘delicacy’. ‘Rank refers to a scale of sizes of
grammatical unit, roughly speaking: the lowest-ranking unit is the morpheme,
the highest-ranking is the sentence.
As for ‘delicacy’, this is a scale of relative
preciseness of grammatical statement.
The major difficulty in systemic grammar concerns the
essential role that intuition appears to play in systemic analysis.
domingo, 17 de febrero de 2013
Copenhagen School
Here you have a little map mind about main concepts on Copenhagen School. As you know they were influenced by the Prague School but they made a better or more functional study of the language
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