SB3 | Notes on Chomsky

• Humans have an innate capacity for language that is hardwired into the brain

• This name has became greatly associated with the study of communication

• His comments post-9/11 were controversial, described America as a 'leading terrorist state'

• Denounces Western greed and hypocrisy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqznqIpkZz0

From interview:

I: So who does control the world? Who are the 'emperors'?

C: Overwhelmingly the United States since the Second World War, Britain before that, and concentrations of private power which are enormous, and tyrannical corporations closely linked with the powerful states. It's a network of concentrated power.

I: But don't you sometimes need big government to deal with big business so that there is a kind of balance between these large forces?

C: It's like saying there's a balance between two members of the Board of Directors of General Motors. Yes there's some kind of a balance but they're so closely interlinked, connected that they're, to first approximation they're the same thing

I: Now did September 11th sort of mark a change in world politics?

C: It's a historic event. It was the first time in hundreds of years that the West, Europe, and its offshoots have suffered the kind of criminal atrocity that they constantly carry out against those, so it's a change. That's why there's such shock in the West.

…it's like reaction in England at the time of the so called Indian mutiny, rebellion…

I: Looking at the current situation, when do you think is it right to intervene in the affairs of another nation?

C: I think there are conditions under which that would be possible. One basic condition is that non-violent means have been exhausted. The second condition is that the people of the country of which you are intervening support the intervention. Under those conditions, and you can think of others, intervention would be justified.

However we don't ever apply those conditions, except say South Africa under Apartheid. There's no doubt that the overwhelming majority of the population would have favoured intervention, probably military intervention, other means had been tried for decades. Did anybody think of forceful intervention? Of course not, nor did I...

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C:...There's a famous phrase that was borrowed by Gramsci, that we should have pessimism of the intellect, and optimism of the will...

Theories

• Universal Grammar Theory | A linguistic theory normally credited to Chomsky which proposes that our ability to learn grammar is hard-wired into the brain / innate.

• Sometimes known as the 'mental grammar'. The theory suggests that linguistic ability exhibits itself without being taught. 

• Proposes that if human beings are raised under normal conditions (not extreme conditions, e.g. sensory deprivation), then they will always develop language with a certain property X (e.g. distinguishing nouns from verbs, or distinguishing function words from lexical words). As a result, property X is considered to be a property of universal grammar that most if not all humans share.

• As Chomsky describes: "…development of language in the individual must involve three factors: (1) genetic endowment, which sets limits on the attainable languages, thereby making language acquisition possible; (2) external date, converted to the experience that selects one or another language within a narrow range; (3) principles not specific to FL (the faculty of language, whatever properties of the brain cause it to learn language)

(1) is Universal Grammar in the first theoretical sense, (2) is the linguistic data to which the child is exposed

CHOMSKY'S THEORY: He argues that the human brain contains a limited set of rules for organising language. This implies that all languages have a common structural basis; the set of rules is what is known as universal grammar.