The syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation... and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. Thi...s system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We thus make a fundamental distinction between the competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (th...e actual use of language in concrete situations).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this... faculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the 'human essence,' the distinctive qualities of mind that ...are, so far as we know, unique to man and that are inseparable from any critical phase of human existence, personal or social. Hence the fascination of this study, and, no less, its frustration. The frustration arises from the coming to grips with the core problem of human language, which I take to be this: having mastered a language, one is able to understand an indefinite number of expressions that are new to one's experience, that bear no simply physical resemblance and are in no simple way analogous to the expressions that constitute one's linguistic experience; and one is able ... to produce such expressions on an appropriate occasion, despite their novelty.... The normal use of language is, in this sense, a creative activity. This creative aspect of normal language use is one fundamental factor that distinguishes human language from any known system of animal communication.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let's call something a rigid designator if in every possible world it designates the same object, a non-rigid or accidental design...ator if that is not the case. Of course we don't require that the objects exist in all possible worlds.... When we think of a property as essential to an object we usually mean that it is true of that object in any case where it would have existed. A rigid designator of a necessary existent can be called strongly rigid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is the name and the thing; the name is a sound which sets a mark on and denotes the thing. The name is no part of the thing ...nor of the substance; it is an extraneous piece added to the thing, and outside of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is t...o change the labels.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The strategy of semantic ascent is that it carries the discussion into a domain where both parties are better agreed on the object...s (viz., words) and on the main terms connecting them. Words, or their inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes and the rest, are tangible objects of the size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes communicate at their best. The strategy is one of ascending to a common part of two fundamentally disparate conceptual schemes, the better to discuss the disparate foundations. No wonder it helps in philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »