A Companion to Chomsky
1st Edition
Published on 13. July 2021
Book
Hardback
640 pages
978-1-119-59870-1 (ISBN)
Description
Noam Chomsky is first and foremost a linguist, but his revolutionary ideas about grammar have had a profound impact upon philosophy and the new field of cognitive science that emerged in large part from his work. Balancing theoretical rigor with accessibility to the non-specialist, this collection of 43 original essays from a diverse international team of linguists and philosophers offers comprehensive coverage of his contributions to universal grammar, language acquisition, linguistic diversity, semantics and speech pragmatics, as well as to philosophy of language, science and mind. The text is organized into sections that include:
* The historical development of the successive theories of grammar, from Chomsky's early work on the formal hierarchy of languages; to his work with Morris Halle on phonology; to the evolution of his "principles and parameters" approach to the immense diversity of human languages; up to the radical simplification of his theories that has been the aim of the Minimalist Program
* Contemporary controversies surrounding the Minimalist Program and the status of parametric variation between languages, as well as work on secondary language acquisition and multi-lingualism
* Comparisons between Chomsky's generative methodology and usage-based and general statistical learning approaches to language understanding
* The significance of Chomsky's work for theories of linguistic perception, processing, and acquisition, including discussions of sign languages, atypical language development, and the neurophysiological bases of language
* The influence of Chomsky's work on natural language semantics, linguistic pragmatics, and philosophy of language, as well as on "modularity" theories of mind
* Chomsky's rationalist, critique of behaviorism and related empiricist approaches to psychology, and his contributions to a "Galilean" methodology in cognitive science and philosophy of mind
* A brief discussion of the relation of his work in linguistics and cognitive science to the philosophical background of his quite independent work on political issues
* A concluding essay by Chomsky himself, reflecting on the history and character of his work
Special efforts have been made to explain technical terms and issues as they arise.
A new addition to the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, A Companion to Chomsky is an indispensable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers with interest in the life and legacy of Noam Chomsky.
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Nicholas Allott | Terje Lohndal | Georges Rey
A Companion to Chomsky
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12/2025
1st Edition
Wiley-Blackwell
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Nicholas Allott | Terje Lohndal | Georges Rey
A Companion to Chomsky
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04/2021
1st Edition
Wiley
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Nicholas Allott | Terje Lohndal | Georges Rey
A Companion to Chomsky
E-Book
04/2021
1st Edition
Wiley
€38.99
Available for download
Persons
Nicholas Allott is Senior Lecturer in English language at the University of Oslo. His work focuses on pragmatics, inference and rationality in communication, word meaning and lexical modulation, legal language and interpretation, and the philosophy of linguistics. His publications include (with Neil Smith) Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (2016).
Terje Lohndal is Professor of English Linguistics at NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Adjunct Professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. His main areas of research are comparative grammar, multilingualism, and the history of generative linguistics. He has published some sixty papers, and several books, among them, Phrase structure and argument Structure: a case study of the syntax-semantics interface (2014) and Formal Grammar (2017).
Georges Rey is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland at College Park. He has written extensively on the foundations of cognitive science, including more than sixty articles and two books, Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (1997) and Representation of Language: Philosophical Issues in a Chomskyan Linguistics (2020).
Content
Notes on Contributors
1. Synoptic introduction
Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey
2. Biographical sketch
Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey
Part I Historical Development of Linguistics
3. From the origins of Government and Binding to the current state of minimalism
Artemis Alexiadou & Terje Lohndal
4. Enduring discoveries of generative syntax
Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng & James Griffith
5. The Chomsky hierarchy
Tim Hunter
6. Naturalism, Internalism and Nativism: Wha The Legacy of The Sound Pattern of English Should Be
Charles Reiss & Veno Volenec
7. Language as a Branch of Psychology: Chomsky and Cognitive Science
Lila Gleitman
Part II Contemporary Issues in syntax
8. The architecture of the computation
David Adger
9. Merge and features: the engine of syntax
Peter Svenonius
10. On Chomsky's Legacy in the Study of Linguistic Diversity
Mark Baker
11. Parameters and linguistic variation
Michelle Sheehan
12. Constraints on grammatical dependencies
Gereon Müller
13. Chomsky's influence on historical linguistics: from Universal Grammar to Third Factors
Elly van Gelderen
14. Second Language Acquisition
Roumyana Slabakova
15. Multilingualism and Chomsky's Generative Grammar
Tanja Kupisch, Sergio Miguel Pereira Soares, Eloi Puig-Mayenco & Jason Rothman
Part III Comparisons with Other Frameworks
16. The view from declarative syntax
Peter Sells
17. How statistical learning can play well with Universal Grammar
Lisa Pearl
18. Chomsky and Usage-Based Linguistics
Frederick Newmeyer
Part IV Processing and Acquisition
19. Sentence processing and syntactic theory
Dave Kush & Brian Dillon
20. Neuroscience and syntax
Emiliano Zaccarella & Patrick C. Trettenbein
21. Universal Grammar and language acquisition
Stephen Crain & Rosalind Thornton
22. Chomsky and Signed Languages
Diane Lillo-Martin
23. Atypical acquisition
Neil Smith & Ianthi Tsimpli
Part V Semantics, Pragmatics and Philosophy of Language
24. Chomsky and the analytical tradition
John Collins
25. Chomsky on meaning and reference
Paul Pietroski
26. Chomsky on semantics
Michael Glanzberg
27. Chomsky and pragmatics
Nicholas Allott & Deirdre Wilson
Part VI Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind
28. Nativism
Georges Rey
29. The deep forces that shape language and the poverty of the stimulus
Stephen Crain, Iain Giblin & Rosalind Thornton
30. Chomsky on the evolution of the language faculty: presentation and perspectives for further research
Anne Reboul
31. Chomsky and Intentionality
John Collins & Georges Rey
32. The Mind-Body Relation: Problem, Mystery, or What?
Joseph Levine
Part VII Methodological and Other Explanatory Issues
33. Chomsky's "Galilean" Explanatory Style
Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey
34. Chomsky and Fodor on modularity
Nicholas Allott & Neil Smith
35. Linguistic judgments as evidence
Steven Gross
36. Chomsky's problem/mystery distinction
John Collins
37. Knowledge, Morality and Hope: The Social Thought of Noam Chomsky
Joshua Cohen & Joel Rogers
Part VIII Reflections
38. Philosophical/historical sketch TO COME
Noam Chomsky Index