≡ Literary Systems ≡

Chomsky believes that you can analyze language without any reference to its content (to its true meaning). He reformulated grammar in a new mathematical framework.

Counterpoint: A famous example of using syntax analysis to translate from Russian to English and back yielded this:

Original sentence: "Strong is the spirit but weak is the flesh."

Resulting sentence: "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."

The above sample is apocryphal.

Noam Chomsky, in the future, will be a Newton-like figure. Like Newton defined the field of Physics for his age, only to be corrected by the paradigm-shift that Einstein brought, Chomskyan Linguistics will be overthrown with a paradigm-shift that removes the formal and the computational from Linguistic Theory. Using the fact that Gödel proved the incompleteness of formal systems, someone will eventually prove that a formal system cannot lie at the base of human language. Computers can simulate a rough model of human speech — current linguistic models do this fairly well — but just as Newtonian Physics cannot fully explain the behavior of the inanimate world, Chomskyan Linguistics will never find the true model of human speech.