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The Secrets of Words

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The Secrets of Words

MIT Press,

15 min read
7 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

Check out the latest thinking from the father of modern linguistics and one of his prominent students.

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

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  • Engaging

Recommendation

Noam Chomsky has famously argued that human language is akin to a snowflake: Just as water molecules acting in accordance with the rules of temperature can result in a host of complex patterns and shapes, language develops according to inborn rules, yet can unfold in unknowably complex ways. In this short but dense text, Chomsky — “the father of modern linguistics” — and linguist and neuroscientist Andrea Moro converse about the past, present, and future of linguistics and the study of the human brain. Though the ideas are intriguing, readers unfamiliar with the field may find parts of the text hard to parse. It also (unsurprisingly) ignores the controversial status of some of Dr. Chomsky’s ideas.

Summary

Early linguistics theorists assumed languages were based on infinitely variable, arbitrary sets of rules, which infants learned by listening and practicing until they became habits.

In the pre-Chomsky world, when linguistics was attempting to establish itself as a new area of scientific inquiry, most people took it for granted that languages were essentially arbitrary assemblages of oral and/or written symbols and that the rules governing them could vary without limits. Linguists concerned themselves with mapping out the physical structure of languages — the sounds and characters — and trusted that a general theory of language would emerge from such analysis. That did not prove to be the case.

During this time, radical behaviorism dominated the field of psychology, and language was seen as simply one more complex behavior that would eventually be resolved into B.F. Skinnerian stimulus-response (S-R) connections. Language was assumed to be, in the words of Leonard Bloomfield, “a matter of training and habit.”

In the late 1940s, Karl Lashley, one of the pioneers of neuroscience, demonstrated that S-R analysis could not possibly account ...

About the Authors

Theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky’s 1957 book Syntactic Structures provided the paradigm for the modern science of linguistics and remains near the top of every list of the most influential nonfiction works ever published. Andrea Moro is a professor of general linguistics at the Institute for Advanced Study IUSS Pavia, Italy, where he researches and writes about syntax and neurolinguistics.

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