The Interesting Part Is What Is Not Conscious: An Interview with Noam Chomsky

Michael Maria Schiffmann

doi:10.5964/bioling.9011

Abstract

The Interesting Part Is What Is Not Conscious: An Interview with Noam Chomsky Authors Michael Maria Schiffmann PDF Article info Impact Citations Published at 13. June 2014 https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9011 Issue: Vol. 8 (2014) Section: Forum Keywords: Chomsky's Syntax Share: Z PlumX Dimensions Views: Total Abstract PDF 8 5 3

Highlights

The following is the transcription of an interview held on 23 January 2013 at Chomsky’s MIT office in Cambridge, MA, between Michael Schiffmann (MS, in italics) and Noam Chomsky (NC, in regular typeface)
The question of biolinguistics, meaning that language can be, and is seen by you, as a biological object in the final analysis, and that would be the fifth point, everything you did has always been developed in close collaboration with other people
One of the first things you did was to read the galleys for his best-known work, Methods in Structural Linguistics (Harris 1951)

Summary

Nice method!

I proofread the galleys for him. I think it’s probably mentioned in the acknowledgements, but that was my introduction to the field. All of that is totally outside the framework of procedural analysis, because you’re using abstract syntactic structure to derive phonetic facts, so it was going to be kind of like incomprehensible in that structuralist framework It looked right, and we, Morris and I, pursued this for years, and in Sound Pattern of English, so it’s a long discussion, and it goes on from there. I mean, as soon as you started looking at, trying to generate the properties of the language, the actual properties, you quickly found that there are some very puzzling phenomena, things were one way, and not some other way, in which they could work This was never even noticed, you know. Yes, Morphophonemics had only some, a few phrase structure rules, but in LSLT, it was assumed that, yes, there is a phrase structure component, but it generates abstract structures

Of course!

Oh yeah!