NOAM CHOMSKY

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. 

*Noam Chomsky is one of the most influential linguists of the twentieth century, is considered to be the father of modern linguistics.

The mainstream of linguistics since 1957, the year in which Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures appeared, has been dominated by Noam Chomsky . It is difficult to overestimate Chomsky’s impact on both linguistics and contemporary ideas in general.

Among some of the contributions that Chomsky had to linguistics are:

Universal Grammar: According to Chomsky, Universal 

Grammar is the system of principles, conditions, and  rules that are elements or properties common to all languages,  the essence of human language.

Noam Chomsky, suggest that linguistic does not need to be taught because it is inside our brains, as an innate ability of language which share properties by all languages in the world. It means that if there is a word for the colour “red” in English will have another word but with the same meaning in other languages. Therefore, universal Grammar would be the innate property of the human brain that causes it to posit a difference between nouns and verbs whenever presented with linguistics data.

Competence and Performance

Chomsky provides a distinction between competence and performance between the underlying ability which allows linguistic behavior to take place and the behavior itself.

*Linguistic competence: is concerned with the child’s grammar, the linguistic input and construction of the grammatical structures.

*Linguistic Performance: deals with the nature of child’s rule system; the psychological processes the child uses in learning the language, and how the child establishes meaning in the language input.

Generative grammar.

A generative grammar is a formal system (of rules, later of principles and parameters) which makes explicit the finite mechanisms available to  the brain to

produce infinite sentences  in ways that 

have empirical consequences and can be

tested as in the natural sciences. 

* Refers to a particular approach to the study of sintax

Linguistic Nativism:

Chomsky argued that much of our knowledge about language is universal and innate, that is, in-born, genetically endowed, a language instinct, part of our biological birthright.

STEVEN PINKER

Steven pinker is a psychologist, a famous writer on language, mind and human nature. He is an experimental psychologist who is interested in all aspects of language and the mind.

His academic specializations are the perception and development of language in children; he is known for arguing that language is an "instinct" or a biological adaptation modeled by natural selection.

Steven Pinker Theory "The Computational Theory of the Mind"

The Computational Theory of the Mind (CTM) claims that the mind is a computer, so the theory is also known as computationalism. It is generally assumed that CTM is the main working hypothesis of cognitive science."Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy". 

Pinker is also a very popular science author, and he published ten books for general readers. Among the two most famous books that contribute to linguistics are:

In Words and Rules "the Ingredients of Language"

Pinker argues from his own research that 

regular and irregular phenomena (verbs)

are products of computation and memory

lookup, respectively, and that language

 can be understood as an interaction 

between the two.

Most of the book examines studies 

conducted on the form and frequency of grammatical errors.

He writes that words are either stored directly with their associated meanings in the lexicon (or "mental dictionary") or are constructed using morphological rules.

Enoch Powell

John Enoch Powell was a British politician who had served as a Member of Parliament and Minister of Health. He is best remembered for his strong views on immigration, especially his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech which created much controversy. 

In this speech he warned of the consequences of unchecked immigration of non-whites into Britain. The speech generated considerable controversy and he was labeled a racist.

*Brigadier Enoch Powell was a British politician, classical scholar and linguist best known for his controversial views on immigration.

*Powell served in World War II, reaching the rank of brigadier. His political career is remembered for his iconic and infamous Rivers of Blood speech, which was interpreted as a demonstration of racism. 

*Powell was renowned for his oratorical skills and his maverick nature.

Roland Barthes

He was a 20th century philosopher and studied semiotics, structuralism and post-structuralism. His main interests were semiotics, literary theory and linguistics.

Roland believes in Ferdinand De Saussure's theories, creating the idea of how signs work, but Barthes takes the theory further. He believed that all signs were not natural, but structured instead.

Roland Barthes said that semiology is the part of linguistics, that Semiology ‘aims to take in any system of signs whatever their substances and limits like; images, gestures, musical sounds, and objects.

Barthes distinguished the analyzing of the signs into two, the verbal and non verbal signs.

The verbal sign: is like the texts of the poster, such as the title, the names of the actors, the date of movie releasing and many more.

The non verbal sign:are the images of the poster which support the verbal signs in order to make the poster is interesting as the package of advertisement.

Barthes uses the denotative and connotative ‘levels of meanings’ to analyze the signs in visual object.

Denotative:  is a strictly descriptive system, 

is the result of the signifier image and the 

signified concept combining. 

For example an apple:  the apple is the signifier and healthy is the signified.

Connotative: is one that has lost its historical meaning. This could be due to a number of things including: changes in culture or terminology, an event, or even just evolution.

Signs range from speech, body language and symbols to paintings, music etc. Barthes’ Semiotic Theory broke down the process of reading signs and focused on their interpretation by different cultures or societies. 

According to Barthes, signs had both a signifier, being the physical form of the sign as we perceive it through our senses and the signified, or meaning that is interpreted.

Noah Webster

Noah Webster (1758-1843), was a 

lexicographer and a language 

reformer. He is often called the Father of 

American Scholarship and Education. In his lifetime he was also a lawyer, schoolmaster, author, newspaper editor and an outspoken politician.

in 1806, Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language . Then in 1807 he began working on an even more comprehensive edition, and in 1828 this was publihed as An American Dictionary of the English Language.

American Dictionary of the English Language.

He was extremely obsessive about words, grammar and punctuation. Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris, France, and at the University of Cambridge. His book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in a published dictionary before.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913).

Ferdinand de Saussure, Swiss linguist, considered the father of linguistics. One of his very important contributions to linguistics is the influential neogrammatical work on Indo-European vowels in 1878, published when he was 21 years old, and a doctoral thesis in 1881 on the genitive in Sanskrit, Saussure became the most influential scholars in the 20th century linguistics and modern intellectual history. He was an excellent teacher of Linguistics at the University of Geneva; together with his students, he created a book ( General Linguistics). This book credited with having changed the course of linguistic thinking from the diachronic (historical) orientation that had dominated 19th century linguistics. The main objective of this book was the study of linguistics.

Saussure emphasized the synchronic study of the structure of language and how the linguistic elements. The theory of signs has been one of his very influential contributions. His linguistic sign is the union of the signifier, the form, the sound, and the signifier, the signified, the function; the particular form of sounds and the particular meaning of the individual signs are arbitrarily associated with each other. One of Saussure's key contributions to semiotics lies in what he called semiology, the concept of a bilateral (two-sided) sign consisting of 'the signifier a linguistic form. 

Among his contributions to linguistics are:

1. Triple distinction: language-language-speech: 

This triple distinction explains verbal 

behavior and communication in human beings from 

Saussure's theory

2. Dichotomy: synchrony - diachronic: Linguistics may be synchronous or diachronic as a function of time. According to Saussure, we should never mix different times, since the relationships and the elements vary, as we know, with the passage of time.