New Releases by Noam Chomsky

Analyzes U.S. policy in Latin America, Asia, and Africa media and the role of the media in misreporting these policies.

No detailed description available for "Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar".

" Noam Chomsky''s work in linguistics has revolutionized our understanding of language. In these remarkable, nontechnical Reflections, Chomsky considers the point and purpose of studying language and explores some of the more general intellectual implications that result from the study of linguistics. The questions he considers are the classical ones. From Plato to the present time, philosophers have been baffled and intrigued by how human beings, with their limited and personal experience, achieve such rich systems of knowledge, beliefs, and values-- systems that guide their actions and their interpretations of experience. In answer to this fundamental question, Chomsky argues that the growth of language is analogous to the development of a bodily organ and is in large measure predetermined by genetic factors. Throughout these Reflections, Chomsky offers incisive analyses of the controversies raging today among psychologists, philosophers, and linguists over the acquisition of cognitive structures, the way language interacts with other mental organs, and the way cognitive structures enter into and guide human activity. He explores the social and intellectual factors that have led to the dominance of certain ways of thinking, and asks why the study of mind and behavior has so often followed a path remote from the general approach of the natural sciences. In examining some of the implications of recent work, her suggests that the conception of man as totally malleable not only is false but also serves naturally as a support for reactionary social doctrines."-- Publisher.

Originally delivered in 1971 as the first Cambridge lectures in memory of Bertrand Russell, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom is an erudite and cogent synthesis of Noam Chomsky''s moral philosophy, linguistic analysis, and emergent political critique of America''s war in Vietnam. In the first half of this wide-ranging work, Chomsky takes up Russell''s lifelong search for the empirical principles of human understanding, in a philosophical overview referencing Hume, Leibniz, Wittgenstein, and others. In the following half, aptly-titled "On Changing the World," Chomsky applies these concepts to the issues that would remain the focus of his increasingly political work of the period. These include the war in Indochina and the Cold War ideology that supported it, the centralization of U.S. decision-making in the Pentagon and the growing influence of multinational corporations in those circles, the politicization of American universities in the post-World War II years, along with his reflections on the Cuban missile crisis and the mass liberation movements of the era. This is the third in a series of Chomsky''s early political books reissued by The New Press. The others are American Power and the New Mandarins and For Reasons of State. Book jacket.

Chomsky proposes a reformulation of the theory of transformational generative grammar that takes recent developments in the descriptive analysis of particular languages into account. Beginning in the mid-fifties and emanating largely form MIT, an approach was developed to linguistic theory and to the study of the structure of particular languages that diverges in many respects from modern linguistics. Although this approach is connected to the traditional study of languages, it differs enough in its specific conclusions about the structure and in its specific conclusions about the structure of language to warrant a name, "generative grammar." Various deficiencies have been discovered in the first attempts to formulate a theory of transformational generative grammar and in the descriptive analysis of particular languages that motivated these formulations. At the same time, it has become apparent that these formulations can be extended and deepened.The major purpose of this book is to review these developments and to propose a reformulation of the theory of transformational generative grammar that takes them into account. The emphasis in this study is syntax; semantic and phonological aspects of the language structure are discussed only insofar as they bear on syntactic theory.