Semantica Generativa

Formalism and Noam Chomsky

Formalism

In mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of strings of symbols that may be constrained by rules that are specific to it.

The field of formal language theory studies primarily the purely syntactical aspects of such languages—that is, their internal structural patterns. Formal language theory sprang out of linguistics, as a way of understanding the syntactic regularities of natural languages.

Linguistic Formalism: Traditionally, linguistic theory has been divided between formalists and functionalists. Formalists favor an approach to the study of language which emphasizes abstract, quasi-mathematical theories of linguistic structure based primarily, but not always exclusively, on intuitions of grammaticality. These theories are usually, but not always, discrete: they do not employ statistical methods and avoid continuous structures. One strength of these theories, at least according to proponents, is that they take otherwise vague linguistic intuitions and make them precise and testable.

"The grammatical knowledge of our time has been between two schools of thought, is the functionalism and formalism, the representative of this current is Noam Chomsky. Chomsky defines the idea of ​​a universal grammar that includes principles and parameters that vary between one language and another.

One of the central postulates of formalism is the functional principle of Independence, "... we are forced to conclude that the syntax is autonomous and independent of meaning" (Chomsky)

For Chomsky there is a strong link between language and the mind. Language is a uniquely human characteristic and highly developed psychological processes evident in the species. "Given the complexity of this achievement and its uniqueness in man, it is natural to assume that the study of language contributes significantly to our knowledge of the nature of the human mind and it’s functioning." (Chomsky1978: 7)

A description of human ability and mental processes... Chomsky makes the following statement:

Regarding linguistic theory is an ideal speaker-listener, who knows its language perfectly and not affecting conditions as memory limitations, distractions and mistakes in applying the language to real use.

Noam Chomsky Life

Childhood and Personal life

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Dr. William "Zev" Chomsky (1896–1977) had been born in Ukraine, then a part of the Russian Empire, and had fled to the United States in 1913 to avoid conscription into the army. He married Elsie Simonofsky – a native of what is present-day Belarus who grew up in the United States – and they moved to Philadelphia. Politically, Noam's parents were "normal Roosevelt Democrats,"

In 1949, Chomsky married Carol Schatz, a woman he had known since they were both kids. The relationship lasted for 59 years, until she died from cancer in 2008. They had three children together and Schartz worked as an educational specialist in the field of language acquisition in children.

For a short time, between Chomsky’s masters and doctoral studies, the couple lived on a kibbutz in Israel. When they returned, Chomsky continued at the University of Pennsylvania and executed some of his research and writing at Harvard University. His dissertation eventually explored several linguistic ideas he would soon lay out in one of his best-known books on linguistics,

Undergraduate Work

Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945.

Zellig Harris, an American scholar touted for discovering structural linguistis (breaking structural parts o levels). Harris was moved by Chomsky’s great potential. Harris introduced Chomsky to Nathan Fine, a Harvard mathematician, and two philosophers, Nelson Goodman, and Nathan Salmon.

1951- His Master thesis was titled
The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew.

Chomsky earned a BA in 1949 and an MA in 1951.

Chomsky received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He conducted part of his doctoral research during four years at Harvard University as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his doctoral thesis, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas

Professional Career

The professorial staff at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) invited him to join their ranks in 1955. He has now worked in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT for over half a century. For his academic pursuits, he has received a multitude of honorary degrees from universities as far flung as the University of Calcutta to the University of Chicago

As a professor, he introduced transformational grammar to the field. His theory asserts that languages are innate and that the differences we see are only due to parameters developed over time in our brains, helping to explain why children are able to learn different languages more easily than adults. One of his most famous contributions to linguistics is what his contemporaries have called the Chomsky Hierarchy, a division of grammar into groups, moving up or down in their expressive abilities. These ideas have had huge ramifications for modern psychology, both raising and answering questions about human nature and how we process information.

Linguistics

Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his Syntactic Structures, a distillation of his Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75), challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar.This approach takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a context-free grammar extended with transformational rules.

 

 

NOAM CHOMSKY AND FORMALISM

Chomsky´s formalism word search game

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Glosario

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Oppa Chomsky Style

LONDON SCHOOL ACTIVITY

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WITH THIS CROSSWORDS ABOUT LONDON SCHOOL

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The London School

Linguistic description becomes a matter of practical importance to a nation when it evolves a standard or “official” language for itself out of the welter of diverse and conflicting local usages normally found in any territory that has been settled for a considerable time, and it happens that in this respect England was, briefly, far in advance of Europe. From the sixteenth century, England was remarkable for the extent to which various aspects of “practical linguistics” flourished here: orthoepy, lexicography, invention of shorthand systems, spelling reform, and the creation of artificial systems.

Phonetic study in the modern sense was pioneered by Henry Sweet, he was the greatest of the few historical linguistics whom Britain produced in the nineteenth century to rival the burgeoning of historical linguistics in Germany, but, unlike the German scholars based his historical studies on a detailed understanding of the workings of the vocal organs. Sweet’s phonetics was practical as well academic; he was actively concerned with systematizing phonetic transcription in connection with problems of language teaching. Sweet’s general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones.

Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech-sound.

The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized distinct academic subject in Britain was J. R. Firth. Firth’s own theorizing concerned mainly phonology and semantics he said that the phonology of a language consists of a number of systems of alternative possibilities which come into play at different points in a phonological unit such as a syllable, and there is no reason to identify the alternants in one system with those in another.

Firth argues that phonemicists are led into error by the nature of European writing systems. A phonemic transcription represents a fully consistent application of the particular principles of orthography on which European alphabetic scripts happen to be more or less accurately based. Polysystemic ignores a generalization about human language which is valid as a statistical tendency even if not as an absolute rule. Another respect in which Firth felt that phonemic analysis was unduly influenced by alphabetic writing was with respect to the segmental principle. A phonemic transcription, like a sentence in ordinary European orthography, consisted of a linear sequence of units.

A Firthian phonological analysis recognizes a number of “systems” of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units that represent whatever information is left when all the co-ocurrence restrictions between adjacent segments have been abstracted out as prosodies.

To understand Firth’s notion of meaning, we must examine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowski for him to think about language as a “means of transfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener’ was a misleading myth. Firth accepted Malinowski’s view of language, and indeed the two men probably each influenced the other in evolving what were ultimately very similar views.

Malinowski clarifies his idea of meaning by appealing to a notion of “context of situation”.

In a systematic grammar, on the other hand, the central component is a chart of the full set of choices available in constructing a sentence, with a specification of the relationships between choices- that is, one is told that a given system of alternatives comes into play if and only if such-and-such an option is chosen in another specified system, and so on.

As in the case of prosodic phonology, so in syntax the London School is more interested in stating the range of options open to the speaker than in specifying any particular set of choices from the range available is realized as a sequence of words.

In order to grasp the rationale of systemic grammar, it is important to appreciate that its advocates do not normally suggest that it is more successful than transformational grammar at carrying out the task for which the latter was designed- namely defining the range of grammatical sentences in a language.

Systematic grammarians claim, with some justice, that their sort of theory is much more relevant than the generative approach to the needs of various groups of people who deal with language.