Language and Mind Author: Noam Chomsky | Language: English | ISBN:
052167493X | Format: PDF
Language and Mind Description
This is the third edition of Chomsky's outstanding collection of essays on language and mind, first published in 2006. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory. This edition complements them with an additional chapter and a new preface, bringing Chomsky's influential approach into the twenty-first century. Chapters 1-6 present Chomsky's early work on the nature and acquisition of language as a genetically endowed, biological system (Universal Grammar), through the rules and principles of which we acquire an internalized knowledge (I-language). Over the past fifty years, this framework has sparked an explosion of inquiry into a wide range of languages, and has yielded some major theoretical questions. The final chapter revisits the key issues, reviewing the 'biolinguistic' approach that has guided Chomsky's work from its origins to the present day, and raising some novel and exciting challenges for the study of language and mind.
- Paperback: 206 pages
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 3 edition (January 30, 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 052167493X
- ISBN-13: 978-0521674935
- Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.4 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Whether Chomsky the scientist-linguist (and certainly the politician) appeals to the reader is very much a matter of personal taste, and in this sense a review of Language and Mind would necessarily be more subjective than would usually be the case for a work of non-fiction. My comments here are however directed solely at objective issues raised by the Kindle edition, as this book demonstrates the advantages and disadvantages of this marvelous device.
First, would-be purchasers of the Kindle edition are forewarned: this is a horrible copy, a fair deal at perhaps $1, but definitely a bad bargain for the reader at Amazon's $15. The print ink is uneven, well below the standards of any other Kindle material I have purchased; if it had come out of the reader's computer printer, it surely would be accompanied by an "ink is low" message. Furthermore, one can see that it was prepared from a poorly handled paper original which did not always feed evenly into the scanner; episodically, the font balloons and deflates like a sloppy photocopy.
Poor technical quality aside, the format of Chomsky's arguments do not neatly fit the Kindle's capabilities. While this device excels at simple linear (front to back) reading, it is poorly adapted to texts that require continual references to examples on earlier pages, as some non-fiction works do, and as Chomsky's definitely does. This limitation might have been ameliorated had the edition been prepared with greater care, providing easy links to the numerous example sentences the author deposits throughout the book, but this copy is largely a simplistic photocopy rendered in Kindle format. It does not help that Chomsky may refer to "page xx", as Kindle readers are aware that the concept of pagination does not exist in their world.
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