Noam Chomsky is the world renowned linguist while also being highly present in political activism. He has written so many books on linguistics and politics that it really is too early for me to judge his work or personality.
I am intrigued though after I recently started watching videos of Noam's thoughts of current political events happening. So let's start with humble beginnings by first exploring his most famous linguistic book, which is Syntactic Structures.
To summarize, it's about analyzing and using several construced models used to identify how sentences, or syntactics are formed, either through nonsensical or through grammatical means.
Syntax is the study of principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages.
You will find terms such as phonemes, morphemes, gramma, phrases, nouns, verbs and consonants to be common in this early work. Argueing finite state grammar and phrase structure grammar as inadequate models, he then proposes his own theory syntax called "transformational generative grammar".
While doing so, he also goes through the morphology and semantics of linguistics, trying to determine how these are formed out of the words and their forms. A famous sentence seen in here as a both a grammatical and nonsensical example is "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously".
Syntactic Structures is my first taste of exploring linguistics, or the scientific study of language, where as form, meaning and context are the general factors when studying this. It's actually a pretty important field of knowledge for the sake of communication, and I was also impressed with how Chomsky wrote this content with "less is more" terms for that is how I felt upon completing it.
And with another book ending the year, I wish you all once more a happy new year, full of virtue, health and wonder!
Rating: **
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