Noam Chomsky

“The Responsibility of Intellectuals”

“responsibility of people,”

“sense of utter irresponsibility”

“A Review of B. F. Skinner 's Verbal Behavior”

“The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act? Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, et al.”

“There are many facts about language and linguistic behavior that require explanation beyond the fact that such and such a string (which no one may ever have produced) is or is not a sentence. It is reasonable to expect grammars to provide explanations for some of these facts. Chap. 8 : The Explanatory Power of Linguistic Theory”

“Despite the undeniable interest and importance of semantic and statistical studies of language, they appear to have no direct relevance to the problem of determining or characterizing the set of grammatical utterances. I think that we are forced to conclude that grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning, and that probabilistic models give no particular insight into some of the basic problems of syntactic structure. Chap. 2 : The Independence of Grammar”

“We can determine the adequacy of a linguistic theory by developing rigorously and precisely the form of grammar corresponding to the set of levels contained within this theory, and then investigating the possibility of constructing simple and revealing grammars of this form for natural languages. Chap. 1 : Introduction”

“Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis. Chap. 1 : Introduction”

“The search for rigorous formulation in linguistics has a much more serious motivation than mere concern for logical niceties or the desire to purify well”