Language and Mind

It's a basic text for the students of social sciences, though not for beginers.

Chomsky can be anesthetizing as a lecturer, so a brief appetizer such as this collection of essays should be chosen ahead of any visual or aural recordings. Don't expect complete clarity, full explanations, or satisfying closure, but do expect provocative insights and deeply resonating ideas that take us ever closer to the center of human consciousness without the religious-mystical jargon. He and Jacques Derrida practically share honors as the two most important thinkers of the last half of the preceding century. At a time when the rage is "diversity," "multi-culturalism," sectarianism, Balkanization, inviolable walls and boundaries, whether for protection or transgression, both thinkers trace the source of such reductive constructions to linguistic impoverishment, whether externally or internally imposed. Moreover, both offer avenues out of the fixed, repressive syntax and limited, distorted semantics that amount to denials of human birthrights and potentials--God-given or otherwise. Whereas Derrida concentrates on the effects, a close reading of Chomsky will disclose that his actual object is their source, the originating organ itself. In his linguistic theory as well as his politics, the "deep structural" archetypal odyssey is ultimately of the subject seeking to understand itself better as object, of mind in pursuit of itself.

Now in an updated third edition, Language and Mind presents Linguistics Professor Noam Chomsky's groundbreaking classic essays on linguistic theory. First published in the 1960s, Language and Mind includes the essays "Form and meaning in natural languages"; "The formal nature of language"; "Linguistics and philosophy"; and "Biolinguistics and the human capacity". An index rounds out this scholarly, heavily researched and annotated dissertation of the nuances of long-standing linguistic theoretical questions, problems, discoveries and issues, recommended for college libraries and language studies shelves.

Noam Chompsky is a genius. Relating to how the cognitive relates to the abstract. A certain muscular memory so to speak. I found the book very useful in my studies on linguistics.