Knowledge of Language by Noam Chomsky

First published: 1985

Type of work: Linguistics

Form and Content

In 1957, Noam Chomsky’s first book, Syntactic Structures, created something close to a revolution in the study of linguistics. The field had been dominated by scholars who analyzed examples to determine how sounds (phonetics) and words (syntax) were put together to create sentences that were considered grammatical by the speakers and writers of a language. In his book, Chomsky called attention to the fact that analysis of structurally similar sentences such as “John is eager to please” and “John is easy to please” does not explain the difference in meaning. In the first sentence, John pleases someone, but in the second, someone pleases John. At the same time, structurally dissimilar sentences such as “Ann gave Sue a gift,” “Sue was given a gift by Ann,” and “A gift was given Sue by Ann” have the same meaning.

Chomsky proposed that such sentences must be comprehended by psychological study, not by structural analysis. He proposed that they have underlying mental structures, or “deep structures,” of subject-predicate relationships. These deep structures can be transformed by regular, known rules (transformational rules) into the variety of sentences cited, their “surface structures.” It is through subconscious knowledge of the transformational rules and deep structures that speakers and writers, listeners and readers, can understand one another. Syntactic Structures established a new method of grammatical analysis, transformational grammar, which has influenced all studies of linguistics since. Like all new theories, however, it was challenged on a number of points, primarily on its emphasis on syntax without much consideration of the meaning of the words themselves (semantics).

Since 1957, Chomsky has amended and expanded his ideas in a series of books, giving increasing attention to the characteristics of the brain that allow people to learn a language and its rules. This area of linguistic study is known as psycholinguistics. Chomsky proposed that certain aspects of knowledge of language are innate to the human brain and that linguistics studies can provide insights into brain functions, a controversial concept to linguists and psychologists who believe language to be empirically learned through example and deductive analogy.

In Knowledge of Language, Chomsky answers many of the critics who have responded to his work since Syntactic Structures. The book consists of a preface and five chapters, the first four of which are closely related as a summary and defense of his psycholinguistic theories. They consider what he calls “Plato’s problem”: How do people know as much as they do about language when the evidence on which the knowledge is based is so limited? Chapter 5 considers the paradoxical correlate, “Orwell’s problem”: How can people know so little about language when they have so much evidence? Chapter 5 is not closely related to the others, as Chomsky admits in his preface. It is a brief statement about the use and misuse of language in politics, a subject of major interest in his publications since 1968.

Of the four chapters on “Plato’s problem,” chapters 1 and 2 give a brief history of ideas about language. Chapter 3, comprising 170 pages of the total 296, presents highly technical evidence to support his contention that the brain has innate principles and parameters. It also presents his theories about what some of these principles and parameters are. Chapter 4 answers criticisms of his use of the terms “rules” and “know” by defining them and defending the use of deductive logic in linguistic studies. The technical nature of chapter 3 in effect limits the book’s readers to linguistics scholars, although a reader with a fairly minimal knowledge of linguistics can follow the gist of the argument in the other chapters.

Critical Context

Following Syntactic Structures, Chomsky’s next books, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964) and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), continued to develop and refine his theories of transformational syntax. With Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (1966), he began to explore more fully the psychological implications of his work, emphasizing the “mentalist,” or antiempirical, nature of language. Language and Mind (1968), often called his most comprehensible book for beginning students of his work, summarizes the preceding publications and suggests the need for additional study of semantics. Also in that work—specifically, in the chapter “Linguistics Contributions: Future”—he predicts the direction of forthcoming research along the lines of abstract mathematical processes, analogies with mental processes involved in space perception, the search for a universal grammar, and psychological and biological studies of the brain’s functions. His work was expanding the implications of linguistics into areas of philosophy, psychology, and the sciences. Subsequent books—including Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1975), Rules and Representations (1980), and Lectures on Government and Binding (1981)—addressed mathematical processes and the search for a universal grammar. It is primarily the theses work of these works and the critical responses to them which Chomsky recapitulates in the four chapters on “Plato’s problem” in Knowledge of Language.

In following the lines of semantic research, Chomsky became increasingly interested in the pragmatic use of semantics in politics and government. This interest led to several books in the 1970’s on political and military semantics and finally to participation in the anti-Vietnam War movement and critiques of political policy. Chomsky’s interest in political semantics is only mentioned in Knowledge of Language, in his treatment of “Orwell’s problem” in chapter 5.

By the time of writing Knowledge of Language, Chomsky’s adoption of semantic research by fellow linguists and his progress in semantics in his own theories had answered the early criticisms that his work was too limited to syntactic considerations. It was his mentalist philosophy that continued to provoke the criticism that he addresses in Knowledge of Language. This book’s importance rests on Chomsky’s summary of his later theories about semantics and universal grammar and on his rationale for the mentalistic interpretation of knowledge.

Bibliography

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