Language and Responsibility - Noam Chomsky

   1975; 192 pages.  New Author? : No.  Interviewer: Mitsou Ronat.  Genres : Linguistics; Interviews; Language.  Overall Rating : 6*/10.

 

    Hey, let’s read a book about Linguistics, the study of Languages.  I know the difference between an etymologist and an entomologist, and do crossword puzzles, so how difficult can it be?

 

    And I’m not messing around with any third-rate vocabularian (yeah, that’s a real word; it’s just very uncommon); I’m going to read something by the grammar guru himself, Noam Chomsky.  He’s written more than 50 books about Linguistics over the course of 60+ years.  I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about.

 

    Besides, how difficult can a study of languages be?  You just look up the history of a bunch of words, assemble them into a coherent system, and voila!  You’ve got yourself a book on linguistics, amiright?  Let’s open one of Chomsky’s books, Language and Responsibility, and see what jumps out at us.

 

    Omigosh!  What the heck is Syntactic Structure??

 

What’s To Like...

    Language and Responsibility is divided into nine sections, plus an introductory “Translator’s Note” (see the end of this review).  The sections are:

    01. Politics

    02. Linguistics and the Human Sciences

    03. A Philosophy of Language

    04. Empiricism and Rationalism

    05. The Birth of Generative Grammar

    06. Semantics

    07. The Extended Standard Theory

    08. Deep Structure

    09. Universal Grammar and Unresolved Questions

My favorite chapters are highlighted in blue.  Yours may vary.

 

    The book is mostly formatted as several interviews by Mitsou Ronat, posing questions to Noam Chomsky, but frankly, it felt scripted to me.  That’s okay though, the other book I’ve read of Chomsky’s, reviewed here, was in the same format, so maybe this is the style that Noam is most comfortable with.

 

      The vocabulary is challenging.  I struggled to understand terms such as Syntactic Structures, Phonological, Generative Grammar, Anaphoric Relations, Logical Form, Deep Structures, Generative Semantics, and Sociolinguistics, just to name a few.  To be fair though, my Spellchecker app took a look at that list, and said it was familiar with all of them.

 

    As you’d expect in a scholarly presentation, there are a bunch of footnotes.  The numerical ones reference the cited writings and can be ignored unless you want to find and read the original papers.  The alphabetic ones give further discussion of the topic, and/or the translating challenges encountered.  Those are definitely worth your time.

 

    I enjoyed learning the history of universities gradually adding Linguistics graduate classes to their curriculum.  Noam Chomsky apparently was a key catalyst in that endeavor.  The “Politics” chapter might seem to be off-topic, but it gives readers new to Noam Chomsky a glimpse at what to expect in his many books on that subject.  And it was fun to see just how much debate can be generated in trying to understand the “Deep” in the phrase “Deep Structures”.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 307 ratings and 28 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.81/5 based on 1,074 ratings and 60 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Noam Chomsky: These empiricist hypotheses have very little plausibility, in my opinion, it does not seem possible to account for the development of commonsense understanding of the physical and social world, or science, in terms of processes of induction, generalization, abstraction, and so on.  There is no such direct path from data that are given to intelligible theories.  (pg. 69)

 

    Noam Chomsky: Many structural languages and many philosophers—Quine, for example—claimed that grammar concepts must be defined on the basis of scientific notions.  For example, that the concept of phoneme must be defined in terms of synonymy . . .

    Mitsou Ronat:  Which means saying that r and l are different phonemes because ramp and lamp don’t have the same meaning . . .

    Noam Chomsky: Yes, that’s one example.  (pg. 136)

 

Kindle Details…

    Language and Responsibility is half of a two-book Kindle bundle titled On Language, which Amazon describes as “some of Noam Chomsky’s most informal and highly accessible work.”  I will read and review each book separately.  The e-book bundle costs $14.99 right now.  ANAICT Language and Responsibility is not available separately in e-book format, so the Ratings given above are for the bundle.

 

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.  (pg. 137)

   Needless to say, there aren’t any cusswords or R-rated stuff in Language and Responsibility.  There were a number of typos, mostly involving spacing or punctuation, but these looked like they occurred at the Publishing stage.

 

    I found the writing style somewhat vague.  Time and again Chomsky expresses his disagreement with tenets put forth by other linguists.  That’s okay, but he doesn’t provide any specifics, and, like most readers, I’m not familiar with the other linguists’ work and am not motivated to read their treatises just to confirm Chomsky’s critiques.

 

    But the big problem I had with the book was its rationales, and it is best exemplified by noting a phrase which occurs ten times in the text: “a priori”.  Which means, and I quote, “knowledge, reasoning, or assumptions formed independently of experience, observation, or experimentation. It relies on logic, deduction, and intuition to determine truths before investigating the facts”.

 

    In other words, conclusions are presented as valid without any examples or facts needed, as long as you can formulate a logical argument.  Noam Chomsky has a low regard for Empiricism.  See the first excerpt, above, for proof of this.  I’m a scientist by trade, which means I’m an empiricist, which means I have a high esteem of empiricism.

 

    Despite those drawbacks, I liked Language and Responsibility.  I’ve read and enjoyed several books about the history of the English language, but the truth is I know little or nothing about the mechanics of Linguistics.  I’m hoping I just picked the wrong Noam Chomsky book to start with, as I have two more sitting on my Kindle.

 

    6 Stars.  One last thing.  The book’s “Introduction” section notes that the text was subjected to two translations.  It started in English (1976), was translated into French (1977), and then for whatever reason was translated back into English (1979).  You’d think that means the text ended up back in its original form, but apparently that wasn’t the case.  Sheesh.