文档介绍：Gennaro Chierchia
University of Milan-a
2003
Language, Thought and Reality after Chomsky
1. Introduction.
In 1956, “Language, Thought and Reality”, a famous book . Whorf, was published. In it,
some fundamental and very hard questions were addressed, which have remained at the heart of an
intense debate since. Such questions include the following:
(1) a. What is the relationship of language to thought?
i. Is there thinking without language? Or does the structure of our language determine
how we think?
ii. How are our linguistic abilities related to our general intelligence?
b. What is the relation of language to reality?
i. Is language a mirror of the world?
ii. Or does language determine the way we view the world?
c. What is the relation of language to culture?
i. Is language a cultural and historical artifact (on a par with other human
institutions)?
ii. Is the design of language wholly and optimally functional to our
communicative needs?
I am formulating these questions in an informal and impressionistic way. In the second half of the
past century, they have been made considerably sharper thanks to the interaction of and debate across
the disciplines that study our various cognitive abilities (disciplines like linguistics, psychology,
neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology, etc.). In the present paper I would like to show how
semantics in generative grammar (the research paradigm initiated by N. Chomsky nearly 50 years
ago) is helping in putting some such questions on firmer grounds through an example, taken from the
grammar of nouns (the mass/count distinction).
Let me begin, in the remainder of this introduction, by fleshing out a bit more the questions in (1).
We interpret language quickly and with hardly any awareness of what we are doing. Decoding our
language is almost as immediate as seeing. In the thousands of ways we use language in our daily
life, we constantly and effortlessly go from words to me