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Noam Chomsky: 3 ideas worth knowing

3 ideas from Noam Chomsky, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• Children learn grammar rules they were never actually taught

  Children reliably produce and understand sentence structures they've never heard modeled and are rarely corrected into using, despite the messy, error-filled speech they actually h…

  — Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

• Noam Chomsky wrote a perfectly grammatical sentence that means literally nothing

  In 1957 Chomsky offered 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously' as flawless English grammar with zero meaning, to prove grammar and meaning are separate systems. He contrasted it w…

  — Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures

• One 1959 book review helped end behaviorism's grip on the study of language

  B.F. Skinner's 'Verbal Behavior' (1957) argued language was just habit, shaped entirely by reinforcement. Noam Chomsky's 1959 review in the journal Language tore into that model, a…

  — Noam Chomsky, A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior

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