Noam Chomsky Quotes about Language

Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow.

Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow.

Flow, Language, Groove

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

Animal, Language, Humans

Source: libcom.org

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

Animal, Language, Theory

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

Mean, Way, Language

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

Noam Chomsky

Weapons, Language, Affair

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

Language, Interpretation, Grammar

Noam Chomsky (2014). “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax”, p.15, MIT Press

Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.

Noam Chomsky

Children, Brain, Language

Source: libcom.org

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

Noam Chomsky

Trying, Language, Kind

Source: chomsky.info

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

Noam Chomsky

Apes, Language, Faculty

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

Elements, Language, Infinite

Noam Chomsky (2002). “Syntactic Structures”, p.13, Walter de Gruyter

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

Noam Chomsky

Reality, Language, Structure

Of course language arose in a Darwinian biological world, because that's all there is, but that world relates only superficially to the pop-biology that circulates informally.

Noam Chomsky

World, Language, Biology

Source: libcom.org

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

Noam Chomsky

Selfish, Language, Genes

Source: libcom.org

Welsh is now almost a national language in Wales. The Scottish dialects are reviving to some extent. I don't think it's a major thing, but it's there, and it's happening elsewhere.

Noam Chomsky

Thinking, Dialect, Language

Source: brightestyoungthings.com