Volume 23, Number 18 · November 11, 1976
Where Chomsky Stands
By Bernard Williams
Reflections on Language
by Noam Chomsky
Pantheon, 269 pp., $3.95 (paper)
On Noam Chomsky: Critical Essays
edited by Gilbert Harman
Doubleday / Anchor, 348 pp., $4.95
Since the publication of Syntactic Structures nineteen years ago the general shape of Chomsky's position in linguistic theory has become familiar. The subject, as he conceives it, is a branch of cognitive psychology; its basic problem is posed by the human capacity to acquire a natural language, something which Chomsky has insisted we should see as remarkable, with regard both to what the child experiences and to what he acquires. What he acquires is an indefinitely extensive creative capacity to produce and to understand an openended set of sentences that he has never heard before. What he is offered by his elders (or rather from them, since Chomsky thinks little importance can be attached to directed language teaching) is evidence, as he has put it, 'not only meager in scope, but degenerate in quality.' The actual performances the child is exposed to are fragmented and distorted relative to his recognition, apparent in the competence he acquires, of what would be an acceptable sentence of his language.
Review, 3126 words
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