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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Oppa Chomsky Style

LONDON SCHOOL ACTIVITY

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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.

 

 

Prague School Activity 

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Copenhague School mind map

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Prague school

Functional linguistics: the Prague School

In this chapter with a summary I going to mentions some ones scholars that working in Prague school and theirs contributions and how influence in others by realized the investigation and advantages in the linguistics also we can see how this language in the time and with those differences between words are used in the world.

Vilém Mathesius (1882-1945) a Czech University of Prague, he published his first call for a new, non.historial approaches to language study a circle of like-minded linguistic scholars “”Prague School”. The Prague School practiced a special style of synchronic linguistics; the term is used also to cover certain scholars elsewhere who consciously adhered into the Prague style. They analyzed a given language with a view to showing the respective functions played by the various structural components in the use of the entire language.

Prague linguistics looked as one might look at motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others.

They used the notions phoneme and morpheme, for instance; but they tried to go beyond description to explanation, saying not just what languages were like buy why they were the way they were.

American linguistics restricted them.

Matchesius´s own which has come to be called Functional Sentence perspective.

Mathesius a sentence will commonly fall into parts: the theme and the rheme, these divisions will correspond to the syntactic distinction between subject and predicate, or between subject-plus-transitive-verb and object.

Descriptivist since these explanations make unavoidable use of concepts which do not correspond to observables and are therefore illegitimate by behaviorist standards.

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890-1938) was one of the members of the Prague school not based in Csechoslovakia. Trubetzkoy began at an early age to study Finno-Ugric and Caucasuan folklore and philology; he was a student of Indo-European linguistics.

Trubetzkoy´s ideas through the book, Principles of Phonology, which he struggled to finish in his last weeks of life.

He an the Prague School were interested in the paradigmatic relations between phonemes, he developed a vocabulary for classifying various types of phonemic contrast: he distinguished between privative oppositions, gradual opposition and equipollent oppositions.

Trubetzkoy, in the Principles, establishes a rather sophisticated system of phonological typology - system which enables us to say what kind of phonology a language has, rather than simply treating its phonological structure in the take-it-or-leave-it American fashion as a set of isolated facts.

The obvious function he called distinctive function is that of keeping different words or longer sequences apart.

Delimitative function, it helps the hearer locate word-boundaries in the speech signal.

Culminate function: there is, very roughly speaking and ignoring a few critics such as a and the.

In the American tradition there is no room for such statements. The Descriptivist’s thought of all phonological contrasts as “distinctive”.

Buhler (1934) distinguished between the representation function, the expressive function, and the co native function; distinctions between allophones of a given phoneme.

Another manifestation of the Prague is that language is tool which has a job to do the fact that members of that School were much preoccupied with the aesthetic, literary aspects of language use.

Mathesius changes were to be explained as the result of various conflicting pressures; for instance, the need for a language to have a large variety of phonetic shapes available to keep its words distinct conflicts with the need for speech to be comprehensible despite inevitably inexact pronunciation.

Frenchman, Andre Martiner, the scholar who has done most to turn the therapeutic view of sound change into  an explicit, sophisticated theory, he describe the chief proponent of mainstream Prague ideas, the book, Economie des Changements Phonetiques.

The key concepts in Martiner account is that of the functional yield of a phonological opposition. The functional yeld of phonological oppositions the amount of work it does in distinguishing utterances which are otherwise alike.

Martinet argues the pronunciation of similar phonemes will overlap and will tend to merge.

King and Wang have tested the hypothesis by evolving explicit, numerical measures of functional wields and comparing the known histories of certain languages with the predictions which follows from these statics.

Roman Osipovich Jakobson is a scholar of Russian origins (1920), he was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistics Circle.

He represents one of the very few personal links between European and American traditions of linguistics. Jacobson’s work is his phonological theory, but his views represents a special development which takes to their logical extreme ideas that are found only briefly adumbrated in the work of Trubetzkoy and other members of the School.

The approach of Jakobson is the notion that there is a relatively simple, universal psychological system of sounds underlying the chaotic wealth of different kinds of sounds observed by the phonetician.

Jakobson and his collaborates, distinctive means is able to be used distinctively in a human language will actually make use of almost all the twelve features.

An important part of the theory is that certain physically quite distinct articulator parameters are psychologically equivalent, as one might say.

Flat represents interchangeably each of the following articulatory parameter values; pharyngalization: and retroflex articulation.

Jakobson makes the point, to begin with, that a study of children´s acquisition of language shows that the various distinctions are by no means mastered in a random order.

Jakobson dismisses with some scorn, as “completely untenable”, such alternative explanations for synaesthetic associations.

Jacobson’s statements about aphasia also seem to be based on very few cases. Preliminaries to Speech Analysis consist essentially of a series of ex cathedra pronouncements about the identity by Jacobson’s twelve features.

One of the characteristic of the Prague approach to language was a readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include a range of alternative system, registers, or styles, where American Descriptive tended to insist on treating a language as a single unitary system.

Prague scholars were interred in the way a range of speech-styles appropriate to different social setting. This aspect has recently been developed into a rich and sophisticated theory by the American William Labov 1970, he recorded interviews with sizable samples, the interviews being designed to elicit examples of some linguistics form- a variable – which is known to be realized in a variety of ways in that community.

Labov´s work is the subtlety, consistency and mathematical it reveals in speakers ‘use of statistical linguistic variables and heares´reactions to them.

Copenhague school hangman game

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