Customer Reviews

Language and Mind

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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.

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.

Whether Chomsky the scientist-linguist (and certainly the politician) appeals to the reader is very much a matter of personal taste, and in this sense a review of Language and Mind would necessarily be more subjective than would usually be the case for a work of non-fiction. My comments here are however directed solely at objective issues raised by the Kindle edition, as this book demonstrates the advantages and disadvantages of this marvelous device.

First, would-be purchasers of the Kindle edition are forewarned: this is a horrible copy, a fair deal at perhaps $1, but definitely a bad bargain for the reader at Amazon's $15. The print ink is uneven, well below the standards of any other Kindle material I have purchased; if it had come out of the reader's computer printer, it surely would be accompanied by an "ink is low" message. Furthermore, one can see that it was prepared from a poorly handled paper original which did not always feed evenly into the scanner; episodically, the font balloons and deflates like a sloppy photocopy.

Poor technical quality aside, the format of Chomsky's arguments do not neatly fit the Kindle's capabilities. While this device excels at simple linear (front to back) reading, it is poorly adapted to texts that require continual references to examples on earlier pages, as some non-fiction works do, and as Chomsky's definitely does. This limitation might have been ameliorated had the edition been prepared with greater care, providing easy links to the numerous example sentences the author deposits throughout the book, but this copy is largely a simplistic photocopy rendered in Kindle format. It does not help that Chomsky may refer to "page xx", as Kindle readers are aware that the concept of pagination does not exist in their world. In Kindle World one deals with "locations", and this edition did not convert pages into locations, leaving the reader with no option other than repetitive pressing of the turn backward or forward buttons to find the cited reference.

Beyond these cautionary objections, I confess to an advanced amateur's fascination with linguistics, and other readers who share this characteristic will appreciate the Kindle's salient advantage, portability, in dealing with a writer like Chomsky. For me at least, this is a text to be consumed in small bites, in those snippets of time waiting in line at the supermarket, on the subway platform, or waiting for the pasta water to boil. Kindle nicely inserts itself into these spaces, more nimbly and with greater availability than bound paper.

It's a basic text for the students of social sciences, though not for beginers.

It is a shame a product of such low quality (font-wise, not content-wise, obviously) is being sold for $15. Parts of the font are not visible, so it is difficult to read.

This work covers Chomsky's theory of the nature of language over the last 50 years, bringing it up to date with a new chapter on his latest ideas. Chomsky still thinks that all languages are governed by a universal grammar that is connected with our genes. He still says that infants understand grammar and work out which language they are learning. The latest development of his theory, referred to in this work, is called the "minimalist project". It is based on faith: the theory is bound to be right, therefore it would work in practice, but we're not going to do that as it would be too complicated.
So, for Chomsky, grammar is still a part of biology, rather than a set of abstract terms, and meanings are still hiding somewhere in sentences a bit like phlogiston in combustible materials. The Chomskyans actually believe sentences contain their meanings, but the only real form of the meanings of sentences lies in electrochemical events in our brains, and you're not going to be able to analyse one of those and say it's the meaning of the sentence "Let's go to the bookshop." The meanings of sentences, in terms of concepts, are not objectively discoverable. Since therefore there is no objectively definable relationship between the form of any sentence and what it means, a scientific approach to grammar, in the style of Chomsky, is a non-starter. Better to read Wittgenstein, who says that sentences do not contain their meanings, but only express them.
Chomskyan linguistics is an odd phenomenon that has some parallels in academic history. It is completely wrong, yet became fashionable, at least in some anglophone countries. It was and is the sole concern in the professional lives of many academics. So it is dying with difficulty, since so much is invested in it. Yet dying it is. Did it do any damage? Yes. Those who were persuaded by Chomsky's theories that language was something it is not had a wrong view not only of language and how to treat it, but also of themselves and of others as language-users, and thus as human beings, since language is so much a part of our humanity.
The publicity for this edition underwent a change. To start with, it advertised "two brand-new chapters", and you still find that in some advertisements. Later it became "an additional chapter". For this new edition, Chomsky sent two articles that had already been published elsewhere in 2005 and were available gratis on the Internet, one of which repeated verbatim three quarters of the other. The publishers discarded one of them.

Noam Chompsky is a genius. Relating to how the cognitive relates to the abstract. A certain muscular memory so to speak. I found the book very useful in my studies on linguistics.