There is a common-sense view of language, which is held by Wittgenstein, Strawson Dummett, Searle, Putnam, Lewis, Wiggins, and others. According to this view a language consists of conventions, it is ...

Humans are often thought to be the only animals capable of language. But it's difficult to prove a negative like this because we'll never definitively know the subjective interior monologues of other ...

The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost ...

Most theoretical linguists argue that people have little more than a "language organ" -- an inherent capacity for language that's activated during early childhood. However, a linguistics professor ...

Technology is a neutral tool that you should use when you have a plan, when you know what you want to find, said Noam Chomsky, the world renowned social and political theorist. Chomsky spoke at the ...

Building on the work of Noam Chomsky, she designed elegant experiments to show that syntax is hard-wired into the human brain. By Clay Risen Lila Gleitman, whose pioneering work in linguistics and ...