Noam Chomsky Quotes About Language

• The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately UNDERSTOOD by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are 'familiar.

  Noam Chomsky

  Creativity, May, Bears

  Noam Chomsky (2012). “Selected Readings on Transformational Theory”, p.8, Courier Corporation

• A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

  Noam Chomsky

  Communication, Community, Culture

  "We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân". Documentary, January 10, 2011.

• If you go back a century in Europe, all over the place people were speaking different languages. There were dozens of languages in France and Italy, and they're all called French [and Italian], but they were not mutually comprehensible. They were different languages. And they have mostly disappeared in the last century or so. Some are being preserved, like Welsh, some are being revived, like Basque or Catelan to some extent. There are plenty of people in Europe who can't talk to their grandmother because they talk a different language.

  Noam Chomsky

  Grandmother, Italian, Europe

  Source: brightestyoungthings.com

• Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

  Noam Chomsky

  Language Words, Law, Generations

  Noam Chomsky (2003). “For Reasons Of State”, p.402, Penguin Books India

• The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if you don't have access to experience, then you're not going to be able to think properly.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Experience, Able

• There is no reason to believe ... that the "essential purpose" of language is "communication". Language can be used to transmit information, but it also serves many other purposes: to establish relations among people, to express or clarify thought, for play, for creative mental activity, to gain understanding, and so on. In my opinion, there is no reason to accord privileged status to one or the other of these modes.

  Noam Chomsky

  Believe, Communication, Play

  "Language and Responsibility". Book by Noam Chomsky, chomsky.info. 1977.

• It's as if we're higher apes who had a language faculty inserted.

  Noam Chomsky

  Apes, Language, Faculty

• There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind

  Noam Chomsky

  Character, Mind, Principles

  Noam Chomsky (2006). “Language and Mind”, p.90, Cambridge University Press

• Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

  Noam Chomsky

  Animal, Unique, World

  Noam Chomsky (2006). “Language and Mind”, p.59, Cambridge University Press

• It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar.

  Noam Chomsky

  Animal, Language, Theory

• The truth of the matter is that about 99 percent of teaching is making the students feel interestedin the material. Then the other 1 percent has to do with your methods. And that's not just true of languages. It's true of every subject.

  Noam Chomsky

  Education, Teaching, Reading

• In fact, by universal grammar I mean just that system of principles and structures that are the prerequisites for acquisition of language, and to which every language necessarily conforms.

  Noam Chomsky

  Mean, Facts, Principles

  Source: chomsky.info

• The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretationand a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.

  Noam Chomsky

  Language, Interpretation, Grammar

  Noam Chomsky (2014). “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax”, p.15, MIT Press

• By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate.

  Noam Chomsky

  Mean, Way, Language

• In studying language we can discover many basic properties of this cognitive structure, its organization, and also the genetic predispositions that provide the foundation for its development. So in this respect, linguistics, first of all, tries to characterize a major feature of human cognitive organization. And second, I think it may provide a suggestive model for the study of other cognitive systems. And the collection of these systems is one aspect of human nature.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Organization, Trying

  Source: chomsky.info

• Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Brain, Language

  Source: libcom.org

• I did not say that language as a completed system emerged in an individual in an instant. But I cannot think of a coherent alternative to the idea that mutations take place in individuals, not communities, so that whatever rewiring of the brain yielded the apparently unique properties of language, specifically recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions, would therefore have taken place in an individual, and only later been used among individuals who had inherited this capacity.

  Noam Chomsky

  Taken, Unique, Thinking

  Source: libcom.org

• Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components... the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation. The first of these is interpreted by the semantic component; the second, by the phonological component.

  Noam Chomsky

  Numbers, Three, Firsts

• The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Character, Data

  Andrea Moro, Noam Chomsky, Ivano Caponigro, Daniel B. Kane (2015). “The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages”, p.37, MIT Press

• We do not for example say that the person has a perfect knowledge of some language L similar to English but still different from it. What we say is that the child or foreigner has a 'partial knowledge of English' or is 'on his or her way' towards acquiring knowledge of English, and if they reach this goal, they will then know English.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Perfect, Goal

  Noam Chomsky (1986). “Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use”, p.16, Greenwood Publishing Group

• I think that in order to achieve progress in the study of language and human cognitive faculties in general it is necessary first to establish 'psychic distance' from the 'mental facts' to which Köhler referred, and then to explore the possibilities for developing explanatory theories... We must recognize that even the most familiar phenomena require explanation and that we have no privileged access to the underlying mechanisms, no more so than in physiology or physics.

  Noam Chomsky

  Distance, Thinking, Order

• Our yearning for democracy is accompanied by a no less profound yearning for peace. And the media also faced the task of historical engineering to establish this required truth. We therefore have phenomena called 'peace missions' and the 'peace process'. These are terms that apply to whatever the United States happens to be doing or advocating at some moment... in short, 'War is Peace'.

  Noam Chomsky

  War, Engineering, Media

• Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

  Noam Chomsky

  Weapons, Language, Affair

• Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.

  Noam Chomsky

  Goal, Principles, Analysis

  Noam Chomsky (2002). “Syntactic Structures”, p.11, Walter de Gruyter

• While language can surely be used for communication (as can much else), communication probably has no special role in its design or evolution.

  Noam Chomsky

  Communication, Design, Special

  Source: libcom.org

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