His introduction is very pause-heavy, but I guess if you speak a lot of languages, you can't always prattle along at high speed. The sound quality is not so great, and Noam's voice, well used as it has been over the years is getting pretty gravelly.
language is usage based and a mirror of our environment or of our ancestors' environments and forms and patterns get routinalized and corrupted overtime, but I keep listening to Chomsky because I am in awe of his awe and the brains of his followers. Furthermore, I like elegant diagrams of sentences that show hierarchical relations between units/ideas and forms. But it seems so wrong to make these statements and all the efforts made to make a machine to describe language is just trying to make a circle into a square, even if that circle has some regularities. In the meantime, us English teachers have no grammar to hang on to other than 19th century descriptions and it is devastatingly depressing trying to learn the ropes of one of the 'brands' of linguistics only to find it is controversial, or that it has already changed, or that there are various versions of it.
Chomsky starts talking at 11:40. :)
NOAM CHOMASKY "THE MINIMALIST PROGRAM
His introduction is very pause-heavy, but I guess if you speak a lot of languages, you can't always prattle along at high speed. The sound quality is not so great, and Noam's voice, well used as it has been over the years is getting pretty gravelly.
language is usage based and a mirror of our environment or of our ancestors' environments and forms and patterns get routinalized and corrupted overtime, but I keep listening to Chomsky because I am in awe of his awe and the brains of his followers. Furthermore, I like elegant diagrams of sentences that show hierarchical relations between units/ideas and forms. But it seems so wrong to make these statements and all the efforts made to make a machine to describe language is just trying to make a circle into a square, even if that circle has some regularities. In the meantime, us English teachers have no grammar to hang on to other than 19th century descriptions and it is devastatingly depressing trying to learn the ropes of one of the 'brands' of linguistics only to find it is controversial, or that it has already changed, or that there are various versions of it.