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Noam Chomsky’s ViGør presentation 10.02.2023: The Miracle Creed and the Strong Minimalist Thesis (1)
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ViGør had invited Noam Chomsky to talk about a subject he chose himself, and the talk was executed on Zoom with both a Zoom and an in-person audience. The talk consisted of part 1 where Noam Chomsky delivered his talk, and part 2 where the audience asked questions. ViGør had some audio difficulties, but we implore you to skip to when Chomsky started his talk.
The questions were asked on facebook, then transferred to zoom, and they were as follows:
- I research inner speech which you have said elsewhere is an important and neglected area. I recently read about how Einstein described his thought processes and their verbal format, and how it helped him formulate theories. I was wondering whether you would share how you experience your own inner speech and what you think it does for your thinking?
- Can you elaborate on the difference between what should be considered discourse and what has to do with grammar? What is your understanding of the term ‘discourse’?
- I apologize in advance as I imagine this is something you are asked a lot, but I'm interested in your thinking on it presently: Do you see functionalist approaches to linguistics as in conflict with your approach or do you consider them to be mutually enriching? If not, can you imagine a future where they might be?
- Near the beginning you mentioned that you think of language as a device evolved for communicative purposes. I’m personally convinced that language also has cognitive functions, in the sense that language might support increased control over attention, or scaffold problem-solving (when we’re talking ourselves through a complex problem in inner speech). What do you think of such a function for language? How does such a function interact with the generative program?
- My question deals with the origin of language, and it being a human-specific trait. In later years, we have been able to sequence ancient hominin genomes, including early human, Neanderthal and Denisovan individuals. Research has shown extensive intermixing of these different hominin groups, which potentially suggests that they interacted and communicated with one another. Do you believe that these ancient DNA samples could shed some light into pinpointing when language originated?
- Does the idea that I-language is perfect or the simplest solution imply that other things like externalization and "discourse properties" would then not be optimal or simple?
-As you find I-language to be completely different from externalized speech, do you think that it is universal and inherent in human biology? i.e. would it be impacted by socialization or differences in word-order of different languages?
- As you find I-language to be completely different from externalized speech, do you think that it is universal and inherent in human biology? i.e. would it be impacted by socialization or differences in word-order of different languages?
- Does an AI such as ChatGPT have an I-language in your opinion, Professor Chomsky? Given it's been trained only on E-languages, does it make sense that a computer can develop one?
- I think you seem to assume pair merge is unnecessary, given that form sequence is illusionary in syntactic computation and some phenomena pair merge was supposed to be responsible for are excluded from syntax. If so, I'd like to know why. Thanks.
- A few of the students want to know: are you familiar with the linguist William B McGregor, who works at Aarhus University?
- Given the increasing globalisation and general mobility (physical and social) of people today, do you think we would feasibly see a trend towards a more general global (or at least hyper regional) language (like the general european language in the Middle Ages. That the evolution of Human language would so to speak to some degree begin to return to a “babylonian tongue” - for example are more and more languages adopting more and more English vocabulary and morphology.
The questions were asked on facebook, then transferred to zoom, and they were as follows:
- I research inner speech which you have said elsewhere is an important and neglected area. I recently read about how Einstein described his thought processes and their verbal format, and how it helped him formulate theories. I was wondering whether you would share how you experience your own inner speech and what you think it does for your thinking?
- Can you elaborate on the difference between what should be considered discourse and what has to do with grammar? What is your understanding of the term ‘discourse’?
- I apologize in advance as I imagine this is something you are asked a lot, but I'm interested in your thinking on it presently: Do you see functionalist approaches to linguistics as in conflict with your approach or do you consider them to be mutually enriching? If not, can you imagine a future where they might be?
- Near the beginning you mentioned that you think of language as a device evolved for communicative purposes. I’m personally convinced that language also has cognitive functions, in the sense that language might support increased control over attention, or scaffold problem-solving (when we’re talking ourselves through a complex problem in inner speech). What do you think of such a function for language? How does such a function interact with the generative program?
- My question deals with the origin of language, and it being a human-specific trait. In later years, we have been able to sequence ancient hominin genomes, including early human, Neanderthal and Denisovan individuals. Research has shown extensive intermixing of these different hominin groups, which potentially suggests that they interacted and communicated with one another. Do you believe that these ancient DNA samples could shed some light into pinpointing when language originated?
- Does the idea that I-language is perfect or the simplest solution imply that other things like externalization and "discourse properties" would then not be optimal or simple?
-As you find I-language to be completely different from externalized speech, do you think that it is universal and inherent in human biology? i.e. would it be impacted by socialization or differences in word-order of different languages?
- As you find I-language to be completely different from externalized speech, do you think that it is universal and inherent in human biology? i.e. would it be impacted by socialization or differences in word-order of different languages?
- Does an AI such as ChatGPT have an I-language in your opinion, Professor Chomsky? Given it's been trained only on E-languages, does it make sense that a computer can develop one?
- I think you seem to assume pair merge is unnecessary, given that form sequence is illusionary in syntactic computation and some phenomena pair merge was supposed to be responsible for are excluded from syntax. If so, I'd like to know why. Thanks.
- A few of the students want to know: are you familiar with the linguist William B McGregor, who works at Aarhus University?
- Given the increasing globalisation and general mobility (physical and social) of people today, do you think we would feasibly see a trend towards a more general global (or at least hyper regional) language (like the general european language in the Middle Ages. That the evolution of Human language would so to speak to some degree begin to return to a “babylonian tongue” - for example are more and more languages adopting more and more English vocabulary and morphology.
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