Ferdinand de Saussure

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Ferdinand de Saussure (November 26, 1857 - February 22,

1913) was a Swiss linguist.

Born in Geneva, he laid the foundation for many developments in

linguistics in the 20th century. He perceived linguistics as a branch
of a general science of signs he proposed to call semiology (now
generally known as semiotics).

His work Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General

Linguistics) was published posthumously in 1916 by Charles Bally
and Albert Sechehaye based on lecture notes. This became one of
the seminal linguistics works of the 20th century. Its central notion is that language can be
analyzed as a formal system of organized difference, apart from the messy dialectics of
realtime production and comprehension. Additionally, at a very young age he published a very
important work in Indo-European philology which put forward what is now known as the
laryngeal theory. It has been argued that the problem of trying to explain how he himself was
able to make systematic predictive hypotheses from known linguistic data to unknown
linguistic data, stimulated his development of structuralism.

His work had two receptions which developed it in two very different ways. In America it
flowered as developed by Leonard Bloomfield into distributionalism, and has since then been
presupposed by all linguistic science. This Saussurean influence, however, has been
disavowed by Noam Chomsky, among others. In contemporary developments, it has been
most explicitly developed by Michael Silverstein who has combined it with the theories of
markedness and distinctive features the Prague School (most importantly Nikolay Trubetzkoy
and Roman Jakobson invented for the plane of analysis of phonology, the Sapir-Whorfian
theory of the grammatical category, and the insight of transformational analysis, in order to
analyze the plane of Saussurean sense proper. In Europe, important contributions were
quickly made by Emile Benveniste, Antoine Meillet, and Andre Martinet, among others.
However, structuralism was soon picked up and calqued by students of other, non-linguistic
aspects of culture, such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Their
expansive interpretations of Saussure's theories, and their application of those theories to non-
linguistic fields of study led to theoretical difficulties, eventually causing proclamations of the
"death" of structuralism in those disciplines.

"A sign is the basic unit of langue (a given language at a given time). Every langue is a
complete system of signs. Parole (the speech of an individual) is an external manifestation of
langue."
Cours de linguistique générale
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale was published posthumously in

1916 by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye based on lecture notes. It is generally seen as
being the origin of structuralism. Although Saussure was, like his contemporaries, interested
in historical linguistics, the Cours develops a theory of semiology that is applicable more
generally.

Semiology: Langage, Langue, and Parole

Saussure focuses on what he calls langage, that is "a system of signs that express ideas", and
suggests that it may be divided into two components: langue, referring to the abstract system
of language, and parole, referring, in essence, to speech or the "putting into practice of
language". Saussure argued against the popular organicist view of language as a natural
organism, which, without being determinable by the will of man, grows and evolves in
accordance with fixed laws. Instead, he defined language as a social product; the social side of
speech outside of the speaker’s control. According to Saussure, language is not a function of
the speaker, but is passively assimilated. Speaking, as defined by Saussure, is a premeditated
act.

While speech (parole) is heterogeneous, that is to say, it is composed of unrelated or differing

parts or elements, language (langue) is homogeneous, composed of the union of meanings and
sound images in which both parts are psychological. Therefore, as langue is systematic, it is
this that Saussure focuses on since it allows an investigative methodology that is rooted,
supposedly, in pure science. Beginning with the Greek word ‘semîon’ meaning 'sign’,
Saussure names this science semiology: ‘a science that studies the life of signs within
society’.

The Sign
The focus of Saussure’s investigation is the linguistic unit or sign.

Fig. 1 - The Sign

The sign (signe) is described as a "double entity", made up of the signifier, or sound image,
(signifiant), and the signified, or concept (signifié). The sound image is a psychological NOT
material concept (a poem can be mentally recited). Both components of the linguistic sign are
inseparable. The easiest way to appreciate this is to think of them as being like either side of a
piece of paper - one side simply cannot exist without the other.

But the relationship between signifier and signified is not quite that simple. Saussure is
adamant that language cannot be considered a collection of names for a collection of objects
(as where Adam is said to have named the animals). According to Saussure, language is not a
nomenclature.

Arbitrariness
The basic principle of the arbitrariness of the sign (l'arbitraire du signe) in the extract is: there
is no natural reason why a particular sign should be attached to a particular concept.

Fig. 2 - Arbitrariness

In Figure 2 above, the signified "tree" is impossible to represent because the signified is
entirely conceptual. There is no definitive (ideal, archetypical) "tree". Even the picture of a
tree Saussure uses to represent the signified is itself just another signifier. This aside, it is
Saussure's argument that it is only the consistency in the system of signs that allows
communication of the concept each sign signifies.

The object itself - a real tree, in the real world - is the referent. For Saussure, the arbitrary
involves not the link between the sign and its referent but that between the signifier and the
signified in the interior of the sign.

In Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll exploits the arbitrary nature of the sign in its use of nonsense
words. The poem also demonstrates very clearly the concept of the sign as a two sided
psychological entity, since it is impossible to read the nonsense words without assigning a
possible meaning to them. We naturally assume that there is a signified to accompany the
signifier.
The concepts of signifier and signified could be compared with the Freudian concepts of
latent and manifest meaning. Freud was also inclined to make the assumption that signifiers
and signifieds are inseparably bound. Humans tend to assume that all expressions of language
mean something.

In further support of the arbitrary nature of the sign, Saussure goes on to argue that if words
stood for pre-existing concepts they would have exact equivalents in meaning from one
language to the next and this is not so. Different languages divide up the world differently. To
explain this, Saussure uses the word bœf as an example. He cites the fact that while, in
English, we have different words for the animal and the meat product: Ox and beef, in French,
bœuf is used to refer to both concepts. A perception of difference between the two concepts is
absent from the French vocabulary. In Saussure's view, particular words are born out of a
particular society’s needs, rather than out of a need to label a pre-existing set of concepts.

Saussure himself identifies a number of flaws in this concept of arbitrariness. First, in order to
allow for numerical systems, Saussure is forced to admit to degrees of arbitrariness. That is
because, though twenty and two might be arbitrary representations of a numerical concept,
twenty-two, twenty-three etc. are named as part of a system and therefore the signifier is not
entirely arbitrary. This is illustrated equally by roman numerals.

I II III IV V VI

Fig. 3 - Degrees of Arbitrariness

A further issue is onomatopoeia. Saussure recognised that his opponents could argue that with
onomatopoeia there is a direct link between word and meaning, signifier and signified.
However, Saussure argues that, on closer etymological investigation, onomatopoeic words
can, in fact, be coincidental, evolving from non-onomatopoeic origins. The example he uses is
the French and English onomatopoeic words for a dog's bark, that is Bow Wow and Oua Oua.

Finally, Saussure considers interjections and dismisses this obstacle with much the same
argument i.e. the sign / signifier link is less natural than it initially appears. He invites readers
to note the contrast in pain interjection in French (aie) and English (ouch).

Difference
Saussure states: "[a sign’s] most precise characteristic is to be what the others are not". In
other words, signs are defined by what they are not. An example may be found in Blackadder:
After burning the only copy of Johnson's Dictionary, Blackadder and Baldric attempt to
rewrite it themselves. Baldric comes up with: "Dog: Not a cat" - a more accurate definition
than it might seem in light of Saussure.

Difference in language is unique; Saussure writes: "In language there are only differences.
Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the
difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms...The
idea of phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that
surround it."
But, shortly thereafter, he adds: "But the statement that everything in language is negative is
true only if the signified and the signifier are considered separately; when we consider the
sign in its totality, we have something that is positive in its own class."

It is frequently argued that Saussure's emphasis on difference is somehow incompatible with

communication, the use of language or parole, which is obviously more than a nosedive into
an abyss of difference. But Saussure acknowledges the positive value of the sign; in this case,
too, a chess metaphor comes up. If, during a game, a piece is lost - for example, the set is
short a bishop - any object could replace it (a salt shaker, a thimble, a candy corn), but as long
as the substitute is set into the board it functions as a bishop and it is that function that confers
value upon it.

The Synchronic and Diachronic Axes

Language that is studied synchronically is "studied as a complete system at a given point in
time" (The AB axis). Language studied diachronically is "studied in its historical
development" (The CD axis). Saussure argues that we should be concerned with the AB axis
(in addition to the CD axis, which was the focus of attention in Saussure's time), because, he
says, language is "a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the
momentary arrangements of its terms".

Fig. 4 - The Synchronic and Diachronic Axes

To illustrate this, Saussure uses a chess metaphor. In chess, a person joining a game’s
audience mid-way through requires no more information than the present layout of pieces on
the board. They would not benefit from knowing how the pieces came to be arranged in this
way.
Structuralism
Structuralism is a general approach in various academic disciplines that seeks to explore the
inter-relationships between some fundamental elements, upon which higher mental, linguistic,
social, cultural etc "structures" are built, through which then meaning is produced within a
particular person, system, culture.

Structuralism appeared in academic psychology for the first time in the 19th century and then
reappeared in the second half of the 20th century, when it grew to become one of the most
popular approaches in the academic fields that are concerned with analyzing language,
culture, and society. Ferdinand de Saussure is generally considered a starting point of the 20th
century structuralism. As with any cultural movement, the influences and developments are
complex.

Structuralism in psychology (19th century)

At the turn of 19th century the founding father of experimental psychology Wilhelm Wundt
tried to experimentally confirm his hypothesis that conscious mental life can be broken down
into fundamental elements which then form more complex mental structures. In this part of
the 19th century, researchers were making great advances in chemistry and physics by
analysing complex compounds (molecules) in terms of their elements (atoms). These
successes encouraged psychologists to look for the mental elements of which more complex
experiences were composed. If the chemist made headway by analysing water in terms of
oxygen and hydrogen, perhaps the psychologist could make headway by considering the taste
of lemonade (perception) to be a molecule of conscious experience to be analysed in terms of
elements (sensations) - such as : sweet, sour, cold, warm, bitter, and whatever that could be
identified by introspection (observation). A major believer was the psychologist Edward B.
Titchener who was trained by Wundt and worked at Cornell University. Since the goal was to
specify mental structures, Titchener coined the phrase structuralism to describe this branch of
psychology (Atkinson, R.L. 1990, Introduction to Psychology. (10th Ed) New York, Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, p767). Wundt's structuralism was quickly abandoned because it could not
be tested in the same way as behaviour. Today, however, the brain-scanning technology can
identify, for example, specialized brain cells that respond exclusively to basic lines and shapes
and are then combined in subsequent brain areas where more complex visual structures are
formed. This line of research in modern psychology is called cognitive psychology rather then
structuralism because Wundt's term never ceased to be associated with the problem of
observability.

Structuralism in linguistics
Ferdinand de Saussure is the originator of the 20th century reappearance of structuralism,
specifically in his 1916 book Course in General Linguistics, where he focused not on the use
of language (parole, or talk), but rather on the underlying system of language (langue) and
called his theory semiotics. This approach focused on examining how the elements of
language related to each other in the present, that is, 'synchronically' rather than
'diachronically'. Finally, he argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts, a
signifier (the sound pattern of a word, either in mental projection - as when we silently recite
lines from a poem to ourselves - or in actual, physical realization as part of a speech act) and a
signified (the concept or meaning of the word).

This was quite different from previous approaches which focused on the relationship between
words and the things in the world they designated. By focusing on the internal constitution of
signs rather than focusing on their relationship to objects in the world, Saussure made the
anatomy and structure of language something that could be analyzed and studied.

Saussure's Course influenced many linguists in the period between WWI and WWII. In
America, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield developed his own version of structural
linguistics, as did Louis Hjelmslev in Scandinavia. In France Antoine Meillet and Émile
Benveniste would continue Saussure's program. Most importantly, however, members of the
Prague School of linguistics such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy conducted
research that would be greatly influential.

The clearest and most important example of Prague School structuralism lies in phonemics.
Rather than simply compile a list of which sounds occur in a language, the Prague School
sought to examine how they were related. They determined that the inventory of sounds in a
language could be analyzed in terms of a series of contrasts. Thus in English the words 'pat'
and 'bat' are different because the /p/ and /b/ sounds contrast. The difference between them is
that the vocal chords vibrate while saying a /b/ while they do not when saying a /p/. Thus in
English there is a contrast between voiced and non-voiced consonants. Analyzing sounds in
terms of contrastive features also opens up comparative scope - it makes clear, for instance,
that the difficulty Japanese speakers have differentiating between /r/ and /l/ in English is due
to the fact that these two sounds are not contrastive in Japanese. While this approach is now
standard in linguistics, it was revolutionary at the time. Phonology would become the
paradigmatic basis for structuralism in a number of different forms.

Structuralism in anthropology
According to structural theory in anthropology, meaning within a culture is produced and
reproduced through various practices, phenomena and activities which serve as systems of
signification. A structuralist studies activities as diverse as food preparation and serving
rituals, religious rites, games, literary and non-literary texts, and other forms of entertainment
to discover the deep structures by which meaning is produced and reproduced within a
culture. For example, an early and prominent practitioner of structuralism, anthropologist and
ethnographer Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s, analyzed cultural phenomena including
mythology, kinship, and food preparation (see also structural anthropology). In addition to
these more linguistically-focused writings where he applied Saussure's distinction between
langue and parole in his search for the fundamental mental structures of the human mind,
arguing that the structures that form the "deep grammar" of society originate in the mind and
operate in us unconsciously, Levi-Strauss was inspired by information theory and
mathematics.

Another concept was borrowed from the Prague school of linguistics, where Roman Jakobson
and others analysed sounds based on the presence or absence of certain features (such as
voiceless vs. voiced). Levi-Strauss included this in his conceptualization of the universal
structures of the mind, which he held to operate based on pairs of binary oppositions such as
hot-cold, male-female, culture-nature, cooked-raw, or marriageable vs. tabooed women. A
third influence came from Marcel Mauss, who had written on gift exchange systems. Based
on Mauss, for instance, Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship systems are based on the exchange of
women between groups (a position known as 'alliance theory') as opposed to the 'descent'
based theory described by Edward Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes.

Lévi-Strauss writing was popular in the 1960s and 1970s. In Britain authors such as Rodney
Needham and Edmund Leach were highly influenced by structuralism. Authors such as
Maurice Godelier and Emmanuel Terray combined Marxism with structural anthropology in
France. In America, authors such as Marshall Sahlins and James Boon build on structuralism
to provide their own analysis of human society. Structural anthropology fell out of favour in
the early 1980s for a number of reasons. D'Andrade (1995) suggests that structuralism in
anthropology was eventually abandoned because it made unverifiable assumptions about the
universal structures of the human mind. Authors such as Eric Wolf argued that political
economy and colonialism should be more at the forefront of anthropology. More generally,
criticisms of structuralism by Pierre Bourdieu led to a concern with how cultural and social
structures were changed by human agency and practice, a trend which Sherry Ortner has
referred to as 'practice theory'.

Structuralism in the Philosophy of Mathematics

Structuralism in mathematics is the study of what structures say a mathematical object is, and
how the ontology of these structures should be understood. This is a growing philosophy
within mathematics that is not without its share of critics.

In 1965, Paul Benacerraf wrote a paper entitled: "What Numbers Could Not Be." This paper
is a seminal paper on mathematical structuralism in an odd sort of way: it started the
movement by the response it generated. Benacerraf addressed a notion in mathematics to treat
mathematical statements at face value, in which case we are committed to a world of an
abstract, eternal realm of mathematical objects. Bernacerraf's dilemma is how do we come to
know these objects if we do not stand in causal relation to them. These objects are considered
causally inert to the world. Another problem raised by Bernacerraf is the multiple set theories
that exist by which reduction of elementary number theory to sets is possible. Deciding which
set theory is true has not been feasible. Benacerraf concluded in 1965 that numbers are not
objects, a conclusion responded to by Mark Balugar with the introduction of full blodded
platonism (FBP is essentially the view that all logically possible mathematical objects do
exist). With FBP it does not matter which set-theoretic construction of mathematics is used
nor how we came to know of its existance since any consistent mathematical theory
necessarily exists and is a part of the greaterp platonic realm.

The answer to Benacerraf's negative claims is how structuralism became a viable

philosophical program within mathematics. The structuralist responds to these negative claims
that the essence of mathematical objects is relations that the objects bear with the structure.
Structures are exemplified in abstract systems in terms of the relations that hold true for that
system.

Important contributions to structuralism in Mathematics have been made by Bourbaki.

Structuralism in the Literary Theory and Literary
Criticism
In literary theory structuralism is an approach to analysing the narrative material by
examining the underlying invariant structure. For example, a literary critic applying a
structuralist literary theory might criticise the authors of the West Side Story by claiming that
they did not write anything "really" new, because they wrote just "yet another" paraphrase of
the structure of the classical Romeo and Juliet text. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a
"formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy +LOVE Girl") despite the
fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group -LOVE Girl's Group")
and conflict is resolved by their death. On the other hand, such a literary criticist could make
the same claim about a rather different story of two friendly families ("Boy's Family +LOVE
Girl's Family") that make an arranged marriage between their children despite the fact that
they hate each other ("Boy -LOVE Girl") and the children commit suicide to escape the
arranged marriage, because this second story's structure can be seen as an 'inversion' of the
first story's structure, since the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of
parties involved have been reversed. In sum, a structuralistic literary criticism argues that the
"novelty value of a literary text" can lay only in new structure, rather than in the specifics
of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed.

Structuralism after World War II

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism like that practiced by Jean-Paul Sartre was
the dominant mood. Structuralism surged to prominence in France after WWII and
particularly in the 1960s. The initial popularity of structuralism in France led it to spread
across the globe.

Structuralism rejected the concept of human freedom and choice and focused instead on the
way that human behavior is determined by various structures. The most important initial work
on this score was Claude Lévi-Strauss's 1949 volume Elementary Structures of Kinship. Lévi-
Strauss had known Jakobson during their time together in New York during WWII and was
influenced by both Jakobson's structuralism as well as the American anthropological tradition.
In Elementary Structures he examined kinship systems from a structural point of view and
demonstrated how apparently different social organizations were in fact different
permutations of a few basic kinship structures. In the late 1950s he published Structural
Anthropology, a collection of essays outlining his program for structuralism.

By the early 1960s structuralism as a movement was coming into its own and some believed
that it offered a single unified approach to human life that would embrace all disciplines.
Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida focused on how structuralism could be applied to
literature.

Blending Freud and De Saussure, the infamous French (post)structuralist Jacques Lacan and,
in a different way, Jean Piaget, applied structuralism to the study of psychoanalysis and
psychology each respectively.

Michel Foucault's book The Order of Things examined the history of science to study how
structures of epistemology, or episteme shaped how people imagined knowledge and knowing
(though Foucault would later explicitly deny affiliation with the structuralist movement).
Blending Marx and structuralism another French theorist Louis Althusser introduced his own
brand of structural social analysis. Other authors in France and abroad have since extended
structural analysis to practically every discipline.

The definition of 'structuralism' also shifted as a result of its popularity. As its popularity as a
movement waxed and waned, some authors considered themselves 'structuralists' only to later
eschew the label.

The term has slightly different meanings in French and English. In the US, for instance,
Derrida is considered the paradigm of post-structuralism while in France he is labeled a
structuralist. Finally, some authors wrote in several different styles. Barthes, for instance,
wrote some books which are clearly structuralist and others which are clearly not.

Reactions to structuralism
Today structuralism has been superseded by approaches such as post-structuralism and
deconstruction. There are many reasons for this. Structuralism has often been criticized for
being ahistorical and for favoring deterministic structural forces over the ability of individual
people to act. As the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s (and particularly the student
uprisings of May 1968) began affecting academia, issues of power and political struggle
moved to the center of people's attention. In the 1980s, deconstruction and its emphasis on the
fundamental ambiguity of language - rather than its crystalline logical structure - became
popular. By the end of the century Structuralism was seen as a historically important school of
thought, but it was the movements it spawned, rather than structuralism itself, which
commanded attention.

Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield (1887 - 1949) was an American linguist, whose influence dominated the
development of structural linguistics in America between the 1930s and the 1950s. He is
especially known for his book Language (1933), describing the state of the art of linguistics at
its time.

Bloomfield's thought was mainly characterized by its behavioristic principles for the study of
meaning, its insistence on formal procedures for the analysis of language data, as well as a
general concern to provide linguistics with rigorous scientific methodology. Its pre-eminence
decreased in the late 1950s and 1960s, after the emergence of Generative Grammar.

Bloomfield also began the genetic examination of the Algonquian language family with his
reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian; his seminal paper on the family remains a cornerstone of
Algonquian historical linguistics today.
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky, Ph.D. (born December 7, 1928) is the Institute Professor Emeritus
of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the
creation of the theory of generative grammar, often considered the most significant
contribution to the field of theoretical linguistics of the 20th century. He also helped spark the
cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior,
which challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of mind and language dominant in the
1950s. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has also impacted the philosophy of
language and mind (see Harman, Fodor). He is also credited with the establishment of the so-
called Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative
power.

Along with his lingustics work, Chomsky is also widely known for his political activism, and
for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments. Chomsky
describes himself as a libertarian socialist, a sympathizer of anarcho-syndicalism, and is often
considered to be a key intellectual figure within the American left, or far-left.

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, between 1980 and 1992 Chomsky was
cited as a source more often than any living scholar, and the eighth most cited source overall.

Biography
Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Hebrew scholar William Chomsky, who was from a
town in Ukraine later wiped out by the Nazis. His mother, Elsie Chomsky née Simonofsky, came from what is
now called Belarus, but unlike her husband she grew up in America and normally spoke "ordinary New York
English". Their first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky says it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. He
describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish ghetto", split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side", with his
family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature."

At the age of eight or nine, Chomsky spent every Friday night reading Hebrew literature. [1] Later in life he
would teach Hebrew classes. In spite of this, and of all the linguistic work carried out during his career,
Chomsky claims "the only language I speak and write proficiently is English."

Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at the age of ten about the threat of the spread of fascism,
following the fall of Barcelona. From the age of twelve or thirteen he identified more fully with anarchist
politics.

Starting in 1945, he studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, learning from
philosopher C. West Churchman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris' political views were instrumental in shaping
those of Chomsky.

In 1949, Chomsky married linguist Carol Schatz. They have two daughters, Avi and Diane, and a son, Harry.

Chomsky received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He conducted much 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, elaborating on them in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures,
perhaps his best-known work in the field of linguistics.

Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full
professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and
Philosophy.) From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics.
In 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. He has been teaching at MIT continuously for the last 50 years.

It was during this time that Chomsky became more publicly engaged in politics: he became one of the leading
opponents of the Vietnam War with the publication of his essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" [2] in The
New York Review of Books in 1967. Since that time, Chomsky has become well known for his political views,
speaking on politics all over the world, and writing numerous books. His far-reaching criticism of US foreign
policy and the legitimacy of US power has made him a controversial figure. He has a devoted following among
the left, but he has also come under increasing criticism from liberals as well as from the right, particularly
because of his response to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Contributions to linguistics
Syntactic Structures was a distillation of his book Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory
(1955, 75) in which he introduces transformational grammars. The theory takes utterances
(sequences of words) to have a syntax which can be (largely) characterised by a formal
grammar; in particular, a Context-free grammar extended with transformational rules.
Children are hypothesised to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure
common to all human languages (i.e. they assume that any language which they encounter is
of a certain restricted kind). This innate knowledge is often referred to as universal grammar.
It is argued that modelling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the
"productivity" of language: with a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms,
humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including sentences no one has
previously said.

The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P) — developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later
published as Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB) — make strong claims regarding
universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed,
and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter
settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit
subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which
are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this
approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical
items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter
settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.

Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably
rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by
children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain
characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds
of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general,
rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to
as motivation for innateness.

More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of
"principles and parameters" , Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery
involved in the LGB model, stripping it from all but the barest necessary elements, while
advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that
emphasises principles of economy and optimal design , reverting to a derivational approach
to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.
Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers investigating the acquisition of
language in children, though some researchers who work in this area today do not support
Chomsky's theories, often advocating emergentist or connectionist theories reducing language
to an instance of general processing mechanisms in the brain.

Generative grammar

The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, though quite
popular, has been challenged by many, especially those working outside the United States.
Chomskyan syntactic analyses are often highly abstract, and are based heavily on careful
investigation of the border between grammatical and ungrammatical constructs in a language.
(Compare this to the so-called pathological cases that play a similarly important role in
mathematics.) Such grammaticality judgments can only be made accurately by a native
speaker, however, and thus for pragmatic reasons such linguists often focus on their own
native languages or languages in which they are fluent, usually English, French, German,
Dutch, Italian, Japanese or one of the Chinese languages. However, as Chomsky has said:

The first application of the approach was to Modern Hebrew, a fairly detailed effort in
1949–50. The second was to the native American language Hidatsa (the first full-scale
generative grammar), mid-50s. The third was to Turkish, our first Ph.D. dissertation,
early 60s. After that research on a wide variety of languages took off. MIT in fact
became the international center of work on Australian Aboriginal languages within a
generative framework [...] thanks to the work of Ken Hale, who also initiated some of
the most far-reaching work on Native American languages, also within our program;
in fact the first program that brought native speakers to the university to become
trained professional linguists, so that they could do work on their own languages, in
far greater depth than had ever been done before. That has continued. Since that time,
particularly since the 1980s, it constitutes the vast bulk of work on the widest
typological variety of languages.

Sometimes generative grammar analyses break down when applied to languages which have
not previously been studied, and many changes in generative grammar have occurred due to
an increase in the number of languages analyzed. However, the claims made about linguistic
universals have become stronger rather than weaker over time; for example, Richard Kayne's
suggestion in the 1990s that all languages have an underlying Subject-Verb-Object word order
would have seemed implausible in the 1960s. One of the prime motivations behind an
alternative approach, the functional-typological approach or linguistic typology (often
associated with Joseph Greenberg), is to base hypotheses of linguistic universals on the study
of as wide a variety of the world's languages as possible, to classify the variation seen, and to
form theories based on the results of this classification. The Chomskyan approach is too in-
depth and reliant on native speaker knowledge to follow this method, though it has over time
been applied to a broad range of languages.

Chomsky hierarchy

Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not
they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy
partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e.,
each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before.
Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modelling some aspects of human language requires a
more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling
others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English
morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant
in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science
(especially in compiler construction and automata theory).

His best-known work in phonology is The Sound Pattern of English, written with Morris
Halle. This work is considered outdated (though it has recently been reprinted), and Chomsky
does not publish on phonology anymore.

Chomsky's influence in other fields

Chomskyan models have been used as a theoretical basis in several other fields. The Chomsky hierarchy is
often taught in fundamental computer science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal
languages. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms [4], and has generated interest among
mathematicians, particularly combinatorialists. A number of arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived
from his research results.

The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels K. Jerne, used Chomsky's generative model to
explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar ... with various features of
protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune
System."

Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who according to some researchers learned 125 signs in ASL, was named after
Noam Chomsky.

Worldwide audience
Despite Chomsky's alleged marginalization in the mainstream US media, Chomsky is one of the most globally
famous figures of the left, especially among academics and university students, and frequently travels across the
United States, Europe, and the Third World. He has a very large following of supporters worldwide as well as a
dense speaking schedule, drawing large crowds wherever he goes. He is often booked up to two years in
advance. He was one of the main speakers at the 2002 World Social Forum. He is interviewed at length in
alternative media [29] Many of his books are bestsellers, including 9-11. [30]

The 1992 film Manufacturing Consent, shown widely on college campuses and broadcast on PBS, gave
Chomsky a younger audience. In a 1995 article in REVelation, Alex Burns described the film as a "double edged
sword--it brought Chomsky's work to a wider audience and made it accessible, yet it has also been used by
younger activists to idolise him, creating a 'cult of personality.'" [31]

Chomsky's popularity has become a cultural phenomenon. Bono of U2 called Chomsky a "rebel without a pause,
the Elvis of academia." Rage Against The Machine took copies of his books on tour with the band. Pearl Jam ran
a small pirate radio on one of their tours, playing Chomsky talks mixed along with their music. R.E.M. asked
Chomsky to go on tour with them and open their concerts with a lecture (he declined). Chomsky lectures have
been featured on the B-sides of records from Chumbawamba and other groups. [32] Many anti-globalization and
anti-war activists regard Chomsky as an inspiration.

Chomsky is widely read outside the US. 9-11 was published in 26 countries and translated into 23 foreign
languages [33]; it was a bestseller in at least five countries, including Canada and Japan [34]. Chomsky's views
are often given coverage on public broadcasting networks around the world- a fact supporters say is in marked
contrast to his rare appearances in the US media. In the UK, for example, he appears frequently on the BBC.
Academic Achievements, Awards and Honors
According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, between 1980 and 1992
Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any living scholar, and the eighth
most cited source overall.

In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University; in
January 1970 he delivered the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at Cambridge
University; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, in 1977, the
Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, in 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic
Freedom in Cape Town, among many others.

Noam Chomsky has received honorary degrees from University of London,

University of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, Swarthmore College, Delhi University, Bard College,
University of Massachusetts, University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Amherst College, Cambridge
University, University of Buenos Aires, McGill University, Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Tarragona, Columbia
University, University of Connecticut, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, University of Western Ontario,
University of Toronto, Harvard University, University of Calcutta, and Universidad Nacional De Colombia. He
is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science. In addition, he
is a member of other professional and learned societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the
Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in
Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the Ben Franklin Medal in
Computer and Cognitive Science, and others. He is twice winner of The Orwell Award, granted by The National
Council of Teachers of English for "Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language."
[36]

Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the
British magazine Prospect. He reacted coolly, saying "I don't pay a lot of attention to [polls]."

Criticism of Chomsky's work in linguistics

While Chomsky's is the best known position in linguistics, his views have been criticized. His
original work in linguistics, dating to the 1950s, is widely regarded as an important step in the
development of ties between language studies and the cognitive sciences. To some degree, his
earlier concepts of generative grammar have been supplanted or reconceived in terms from
cognitive science, rather than in terms used in language studies of the time. Current linguistics
literature boasts many important alternatives to Chomsky's specific models of syntax, though
most owe much to Chomsky's work. Prominent among these are Head-Driven Phrase
Structure Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar. These proposals differ from Chomsky's
principally in the types of structures assumed, and in the search for "representational"
alternatives to step-by-step computation (called "derivation" in Chomskyan work). Another
more radical alternative to Chomsky's position is that proposed by George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson. Their cognitive linguistics was developed out of Chomskyan linguistics but differs
from it in significant ways. Specifically, they argue against the neo-Cartesian aspects of
Chomsky's theories, and state that Chomsky fails to take account of the extent to which
cognition is embodied.

Another strong source of criticism of Chomsky's linguistics comes from some researchers
who study language acquisition. Many researchers in this field do not take a Chomskyan
approach, and some, such as Michael Tomasello and Elizabeth Bates, have been very critical
of the Chomskyan approach to language learning. Most of this criticism surrounds
Chomskyan concepts of innateness. Controversy surrounds the extent and nature of evidence
for the principles and parameters approach to language acquisition (which suggests that a
significant portion of language learning involves setting a finite and predetermined set of
parameters). Tomasello has argued that children's early utterances lack syntactic structure, and
Bates suggests that early linguistic behavior is far more compatible with connectionist or
emergentist views of learning, which do not need to posit any preexisting structure. In reply,
researchers such as Kenneth Wexler and Lila Gleitman disagree with the assertion that
children's early utterances have no syntactic structure and argue that there is in fact evidence
for the acquisition of syntactic parameters in early speech -- for example, acquisition of the
"verb second" property of German in the second year of life.

Some researchers in computational linguistics are also critical of Chomsky's approach to

language learning. Chomskyan theories of syntax (since they are concerned with modelling
linguistic competence) have very little to say about the actual process of language acquisition,
and most research in language acquisition has had to rely on statistical modelling to produce
working models of syntactic comprehension. Some have argued that such models are hard to
integrate with Chomskyan theories of linguistic competence (in particular, theories in the
principles and parameters framework).

In a much more radical way, philosophers in the tradition of Wittgenstein (such as Saul
Kripke) argue that Chomskyans are fundamentally wrong about the role of rule following in
human cognition. In a similar way philosophers in the
phenomenological/existential/hermeneutic traditions oppose the abstract neo-rationalist
aspects of Chomsky's thought. The contemporary philosopher who best represents this view
is, perhaps, Hubert Dreyfus, also famous (or notorious) for his attacks on artificial
intelligence.

Another common criticism of Chomskyan analyses of specific languages is that they force
languages into an English-like mold. There might once have been justice to this criticism.
English (Chomsky's native language) was the first language whose syntax was subjected to
serious investigation from a Chomskyan perspective. English-specific results were thus the
natural starting point for the investigation of other languages. Since the late 1970s, however,
as the field assimilated data from a wide variety of languages (and the field itself was
increasingly internationalized), this criticism has been heard with decreasing frequency --
especially as it has become clear that in many respects, English is a typological outlier among
languages.

The "autonomy" of syntax has received much criticism. In particular the work of Anna
Wierzbicka argues that syntax is semantically motivated. Chomsky's own position on the
relationship between syntax and semantics is somewhat unclear, since he thinks that much of
what is called semantics is actually syntax (since it involves the rule-based manipulation of
abstract symbols). However, Chomsky is often regarded as an advocate of an autonomous
syntax.
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (October 11, 1896 - July 18, 1982) was a Russian thinker who
became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the
development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art.

Jakobson was born to a well-to-do family in Russia, where he developed a fascination with
language at a very young age. As a student he was a leading figure of the Moscow Linguistic
Circle and took part in Moscow's active world of avant-garde art and poetry. The linguistics of
the time was overwhelmingly neogrammarian and insisted that the only scientific study of
language was to study the history and development of words across time. Jakobson, on the
other hand, had come into contact with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, and developed an
approach focused on the way in which language's structure served its basic function - to
communicate information between speakers.

1920 was a year of political upheaval in Russia, and Jakobson moved to Prague to continue
his doctoral studies. There he was, along with Nikolai Trubetzkoi, one of the founders of the
"Prague school" of linguistic theory. There his numerous works on phonetics helped continue
to develop his concerns with the structure and function of language.

Jakobson left Prague at the start of WWII for Scandinavia. As the war advanced west, he fled
to New York City to become part of the wider community of intellectual emigrees who fled
there. At the École Libre des Hautes Etudes, a sort of Francophone university-in-exile, he met
and collaborated with Claude Lévi-Strauss, who would also become a key exponent of
structuralism. He also made the acquaintance of many American linguists and anthropologists,
such as Franz Boas, Benjamin Whorf, and Leonard Bloomfield.

In 1949 Jakobson moved to Harvard University, where he remained for the rest of his life. In
the early 1960s Jakobson shifted his emphasis to a more comprehensive view of language and
began writing about communication sciences as whole.

Jakobson distinguishes six communication functions, each associated with a dimension of the
communication process:

Dimensions
1 context
2 message
3 sender --------------- 4 receiver
5 channel
6 code

Functions
1 referential (= contextual information)
2 poetic (= autotelic)
3 emotive (= self-expression)
4 conative (= vocative or imperative addressing of receiver)
5 phatic (= checking channel working)
6 metalingual (= checking code working)
One of the six functions is always the dominant function in a text and usually related to the
type of text. In poetry, the dominant function is the poetic function: the focus is on the
message itself. The true hallmark of poetry is according to Jakobson "the projection of the
paradigmatic axis on the syntagmatic axis". [The exact and complete explanation of this
principle is beyond the scope of this article.] Very broadly speaking, it implies that poetry
successfully combines and integrates form and function. An infamous example of this
principle is the political slogan "I like Ike." Jakobson's theory of communicative functions
was first published in "Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics", in: Thomas A. Sebeok,
Style In Language, Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1960, p. 350-377.

Jakobson's three major ideas in linguistics play a major role in the field to this day: linguistic
typology, markedness and linguistic universals. The three concepts are tightly intertwined:
typology is the classification of languages in terms of shared grammatical features (as
opposed to shared origin), markedness is (very roughly) a study of how certain forms of
grammatical organization are more "natural" than others, and linguistic universals is the study
of the general features of languages in the world. He also influenced Nicolas Ruwet's
paradigmatic analysis.