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Language Quotes by Noam Chomsky

70 Language quotes by Noam Chomsky

All Language quotes Noam Chomsky’s page

Language is a collection of sentences built from a limited set of building blocks. According to Chomsky, an innate universal grammar supplies the deep principles that let any human mind acquire and use language. He also points out that language can be a powerful weapon in politics and everyday life.

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

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Human language is nothing like the signalling systems of other animals.

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Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow.

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My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

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

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There is a kind of nonlinguistic thought going on which we are trying to represent in language, and we know that sometimes…

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Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good…

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I doubt that national languages will disappear. In fact, to some extent they're becoming more diverse, like in Europe.

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. . . among all grammars meeting this condition (of adequacy), we select the simplest.

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

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

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It's true that language is in a sense linear but that is as obvious as perceptual space is three-dimensional.

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The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability to…

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Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual,…

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For us, we are all very different, our languages are very different, and our societies are very different. But if we could…

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If we understood, as we do not, the physical bases for intellectual structures, I have little doubt that we would find structures…

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I have not suggested that the emergence of language is instantaneous. Rather, that the rewiring of the brain enabling an infinite array…

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

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I think a very important aspect of language has to do with the establishment of social relations and interactions. Often, this is…

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If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language…

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I haven't seen any claim that Piraha lacks recursion, that is, that there are a finite number of sentences or sentence frames.…

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In Europe there's kind of a reaction to the European Union, kind of a move towards some kind of regionalization. It's more…

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Imagine an extrahuman observer looking at us. Such an extrahuman observer would be struck precisely by the uniformity of human languages, by…

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You can imagine a different world in which a number of species developed with different genetically determined linguistic systems. It hasn't happened…

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I think that in order to achieve progress in the study of language and human cognitive faculties in general it is necessary…

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It's commonly assumed that the emergence of language was a key element of the great leap. We of course know very little…

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There is no reason to believe ... that the "essential purpose" of language is "communication". ... Language can be used to transmit…

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In studying language we can discover many basic properties of this cognitive structure, its organization, and also the genetic predispositions that provide…

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

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Selfish-gene theory tells us nothing about the value of interacting through language.

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Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our…

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Of course language arose in a Darwinian biological world, because that's all there is, but that world relates only superficially to the…

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For one thing, studying language is by itself a part of a study of human intelligence that is, perhaps, the central aspect…

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The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if…

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Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation…

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English is a second language in most of the educated sectors of Europe and much of the world. But maybe in the…

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As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite…

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There is undoubtedly much to learn about the social uses of language, for communication or for other purposes. But at present there…

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From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and…

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There isn't much doubt that like other animal societies, those of Homo sapiens involved plenty of cooperation, which might have been considerably…

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