A Companion to Chomsky

A COMPANION TO CHOMSKY

Widely considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky has revolutionized modern linguistics. His thought has had a profound impact upon the philosophy of language, mind, and science, as well as the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science which his work helped to establish. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to his substantial body of work and the range of its influence, an international assembly of prominent linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists reflect upon the interdisciplinary reach of Chomsky's intellectual contributions.

Balancing theoretical rigor with accessibility to the non-specialist, the Companion is organized into eight sections—including the historical development of Chomsky's theories and the current state of the art, comparison with rival usage-based approaches, and the relation of his generative approach to work on linguistic processing, acquisition, semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. Later chapters address Chomsky's rationalist critique of behaviorism and related empiricist approaches to psychology, as well as his insistence upon a "Galilean" methodology in cognitive science. Following a brief discussion of the relation of his work in linguistics to his work on political issues, the book concludes with an essay written by Chomsky himself, reflecting on the history and character of his work in his own words.

A significant contribution to the study of Chomsky's thought, A Companion to Chomsky is an indispensable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers with interest in Noam Chomsky's intellectual legacy as one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century.

Nicholas Allott is Senior Lecturer in English language at the University of Oslo. His work focuses on pragmatics, inference and rationality in communication, word meaning and lexical modulation, legal language and interpretation, and the philosophy of linguistics. His publications include (with Neil Smith) Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (2016).  

Terje Lohndal is Professor of English Linguistics at NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Adjunct Professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. His main areas of research are comparative grammar, multilingualism, and the history of generative linguistics. He has published some sixty papers, and several books, among them, Phrase structure and argument Structure: a case study of the syntax-semantics interface (2014) and Formal Grammar (2017). 

Georges Rey is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland at College Park. He has written extensively on the foundations of cognitive science, including more than sixty articles and two books, Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (1997) and Representation of Language: Philosophical Issues in a Chomskyan Linguistics (2020). 

Notes on Contributors

1. Synoptic introduction

Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey

2. Biographical sketch

Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey

Part I Historical Development of Linguistics

3. From the origins of Government and Binding to the current state of minimalism

Artemis Alexiadou & Terje Lohndal

4. Enduring discoveries of generative syntax

Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng & James Griffith

5. The Chomsky hierarchy

Tim Hunter

6. Naturalism, Internalism and Nativism: Wha The Legacy of The Sound Pattern of English Should Be

Charles Reiss & Veno Volenec

7. Language as a Branch of Psychology: Chomsky and Cognitive Science

Lila Gleitman

Part II Contemporary Issues in syntax

8. The architecture of the computation

David Adger

9. Merge and features: the engine of syntax

Peter Svenonius

10. On Chomsky’s Legacy in the Study of Linguistic Diversity

Mark Baker

11. Parameters and linguistic variation

Michelle Sheehan

12. Constraints on grammatical dependencies

Gereon Müller

13. Chomsky's influence on historical linguistics: from Universal Grammar to Third Factors

Elly van Gelderen

14.  Second Language Acquisition

Roumyana Slabakova

15.  Multilingualism and Chomsky’s Generative Grammar

Tanja Kupisch, Sergio Miguel Pereira Soares, Eloi Puig-Mayenco & Jason Rothman

Part III  Comparisons with Other Frameworks

16. The view from declarative syntax

Peter Sells

17. How statistical learning can play well with Universal Grammar

Lisa Pearl

18. Chomsky and Usage-Based Linguistics

Frederick Newmeyer

Part IV  Processing and Acquisition

19. Sentence processing and syntactic theory

Dave Kush & Brian Dillon

20. Neuroscience and syntax

Emiliano Zaccarella & Patrick C. Trettenbein

21. Universal Grammar and language acquisition

Stephen Crain & Rosalind Thornton

22. Chomsky and Signed Languages

Diane Lillo-Martin

23. Atypical acquisition

Neil Smith & Ianthi Tsimpli

Part V Semantics, Pragmatics and Philosophy of Language

24. Chomsky and the analytical tradition

John Collins

25. Chomsky on meaning and reference

Paul Pietroski

26. Chomsky on semantics

Michael Glanzberg

27. Chomsky and pragmatics

Nicholas Allott & Deirdre Wilson

Part VI  Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind

28.   Nativism

Georges Rey

29.  The deep forces that shape language and the poverty of the stimulus

Stephen Crain, Iain Giblin & Rosalind Thornton

30.  Chomsky on the evolution of the language faculty: presentation and perspectives for further research

Anne Reboul

31.  Chomsky and Intentionality

John Collins & Georges Rey

32.  The Mind-Body Relation: Problem, Mystery, or What?

Joseph Levine

Part VII Methodological and Other Explanatory Issues

33.  Chomsky’s “Galilean” Explanatory Style

Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey

34.  Chomsky and Fodor on modularity

Nicholas Allott & Neil Smith

35.  Linguistic judgments as evidence

Steven Gross

36.  Chomsky’s problem/mystery distinction

John Collins

37. Knowledge, Morality and Hope: The Social Thought of Noam Chomsky

Joshua Cohen & Joel Rogers

Part VIII Reflections

38. Philosophical/historical sketch TO COME

Noam Chomsky

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