About
Reviews (1)
Dec 12, 2019
Just brilliant
Chomsky is one of the greatest scientists of all time, and this book is a great place to start for the layman who wants to understand more of the wonders of our capacity for language. Just think about what you are doing now: you are converting pixels on a screen into thoughts that I've encoded there for you. How is this done? Very little is known, but without Chomsky, even less would have been known. He took Wilhelm von Humboldt's famous description of language ("Infinite use of finite means") and formalized it into generative grammars - - functions that can generate an infinite number of hierarchically structured expressions, each of which maps to form and meaning.