Product Description

This is the long-awaited third edition of Chomsky's outstanding collection of essays on language and mind. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory. This new edition complements them with an additional chapter and a new preface, bringing Chomsky's influential approach into the twenty-first century. Chapters 1-6 present Chomsky's early work on the nature and acquisition of language as a genetically endowed, biological system (Universal Grammar), through the rules and principles of which we acquire an internalized knowledge (I-language). Over the past fifty years, this framework has sparked an explosion of inquiry into a wide range of languages, and has yielded some major theoretical questions. The final chapter revisits the key issues, reviewing the 'biolinguistic' approach that has guided Chomsky's work from its origins to the present day, and raising some novel and exciting challenges for the study of language and mind.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #331374 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780521674935
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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About the Author
Noam Chomsky is Professor of Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His many books include New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and On Nature and Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Customer Reviews

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.

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.