Language and Mind by Noam Chomsky

Author:Noam Chomsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2013-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

2 John is certain to leave.

Each of us has mastered and internally represented a system of grammar that assigns structural descriptions to these sentences; we use this knowledge, totally without awareness or even the possibility of awareness, in producing these sentences or understanding them when they are produced by others. The structural descriptions include a phonetic representation of the sentences and a specification of their meaning. In the case of the cited examples 1 and 2, the structural descriptions must convey roughly the following information: they must indicate that in the case of 1, a given psychological state (namely, being certain that Bill will leave) is attributed to John; whereas in the case of 2, a given logical property (namely, the property of being certain) is attributed to the proposition that John will leave. Despite the superficial similarity of form of these two sentences, the structural descriptions generated by the grammar must indicate that their meanings are very different: one attributes a psychological state to John, the other attributes a logical property to an abstract proposition. The second sentence might be paraphrased in a very different form:

3 That John will leave is certain.

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