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Chomsky paper
Jana Fortier (fortier@STUDENTS.WISC.EDU)
Mon, 4 Dec 1995 10:39:33 -0600
>In one of his books I read that he considers Levi-Strauss the
>only one doing getting anywhere near what he considers the
>"right direction" .
just a bit of lore from my undergraduate days. i read something in DAEDALUS
(a journal)from ?1973 by a well known sociolinguist (Dell Hymes) who
despises chomsky. The article is called something like "Inequality among
speakers". he talkes about chomsky's transformational
grammar theories which were so popular in the 1960-80's. He argued that
T-grammar was forced upon us for political reasons
meant to increase the influence of the MIT linguists. he was right, too.
Concerning anthro, T-grammar was really influencial, especially in
structuralism, cognitive anthro and ethnoscience. chomsky loves (yuck) Levi
- Strauss cuz L-S basically lifted Chomsky's T-grammar and applied it to
kinship and exchange studies. (more yuck). remember the idea that there is
a surface structure and a deep structure to language? L-S applied this to
culture, looking for deep structures of thought which became evident in the
surface structure of cultural activities. take L-S's explorations of myth,
for example. in STRUCTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY (wow, so long ago), he has an
section called "4 winnibago myths". he shows how they look on the surface,
i.e., when they're told (w/ no contextual features unfortunately). then he
goes into their "deep structures" to show basic underlying ideologies held
by the Winnegago.
more babble on this? just email me.
Jana
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