Noam Chomsky Language Quotes & Sayings

If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong. — Noam Chomsky

Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow. — Noam Chomsky

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

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

There are many things in life that you feel you need such as television, magazines, teachers telling that you have to make money and be successful, but if you have some kind of hope, something to hold onto, then all this will no longer be important. If you can make your next day better than the previous one, then you will see what it really means something to you and not everything that people think you need for your life. — Billie Joe Armstrong

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

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

UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of thisfaculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language. — Noam Chomsky

Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that. — Noam Chomsky

The question is whether distinct cognitive structures can be identified, which interact in the real use of language and linguistic judgments, the grammatical system being one of these. Certainly, — Noam Chomsky

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

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

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English. — Noam Chomsky

Magic has its own weight, and that weight, the gravity of it, is pulling the fabric of reality like a bowling ball on a spandex sheet. — Thomm Quackenbush

In rational inquiry, we idealize to selected domains in such a way (we hope) as to permit us to discover crucial features of the world. Data and observations, in the sciences, have an instrumental character. They are of no particular interest in themselves, but only insofar as they constitute evidence that permits one to determine fundamental features of the real world, within a course of inquiry that is invariably undertaken under sharp idealizations, often implicit and simply common understanding, but always present. — Noam Chomsky

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs. — Noam Chomsky

Over my career, I've had to do a lot of shows that involve stunts, and I so enjoy stunts. — J. August Richards

Yazoo was Vince's sound ultimately. At the time Vince and I got together he had only recorded one album with Depeche and Depeche were to go on to greater things. — Alison Moyet

When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles. — Noam Chomsky

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

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa. — Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky, in particular, says flatly and often that he has very little concern for language in and of itself; never has, never will. His driving concern is with mental structure, and language is the most revealing tool he has for getting at the mind. Most linguists these days follow Chomsky's lead here. — Randy Allen Harris

Because you cannot study the acquisition or use of language in an intelligent manner without having some idea about this language which is acquired or utilized. — Noam Chomsky

A human language is a system of remarkable complexity. To come to know a human language would be an extraordinary achievement for a creature not specifically designed to accomplish this task. A normal child acquires this knowledge on relatively slight exposure and without specific training. He can then quite effortlessly make use of an intricate structure of specific rules and guiding principles to convey his thoughts and feelings to others, arousing in them novel ideas and subtle perceptions and judgments. — Noam Chomsky

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

Suppose a top politician, entertainment figure, or sports star said it didn't really matter who shot Lincoln or why, who attacked Pearl Harbor, the Alamo or the USS Liberty. Imagine the derision. Imagine the ridicule. Imagine the loss in credibility and marketing revenue. Now imagine if a well-respected academic 'who should know better' said exactly the same thing. It doesn't really matter who committed a great crime; history had nothing to teach us; we should never waste precious time trying to apprehend the perpetrators, nor understand their motives but focus only on the outcome of their foul deeds.

Well, that is exactly what Noam Chomsky appears to believe. Do not focus on the plot or the plotters or the clever planning of any crime but only the aftermath. Strangely, I had always thought linguistics was the scientific study of language rather than a lame attempt at disinformation. — Douglas Herman

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

That traitorous bastard. The idiot who thinks he's won himself a pretty girl. He has no idea who she is. No idea what she'd about to become.
And if he thinks he's even remotely suited to match her, he's even more of an idiot than I gave him credit for. — Tahereh Mafi

Never complain you don't have what you don't want. — Amber Polo

From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense. — Noam Chomsky

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

As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use. — Noam Chomsky

The structure of language determines not only thought, but reality itself. — Noam Chomsky

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

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