Understanding Linguistics

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Professor Noam Chomsky visits Google Cambridge to answer the following questions from Googlers:  

1. Your early view of the potential abuse of the Internet as a political medium seemed to convey a wait and see attitude. How has your view evolved and where do you think the balance of power is headed?  2:43 
2. What is the most interesting insight the science of Linguistics has revealed but that the public at large seems not to know about or appreciate? 13:00 
3. In "Hopes and Prospects" you mention your colleague Kenneth Hale and his work with Native Americans. In your opinion, how important is the problem of language extinction? That is, how important is it -  for humanity to preserve the current level of linguistic diversity? 18:03 
4. Can you comment on the contribution of research in statistical natural language processing to linguistics? 30:00 
5. What, in your opinion, are the most effective strategies for building a more just and peaceful world? And in your view, what are the most significant takeaways from Occupy, the Arab Spring,  and the Ukrainian "Euromaidan" uprising? 35:11 
6. In "Hopes and Prospects" you compare Obama with Bush2. It's 4 years later now. What would you say today? 41:39

Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain 

We think with our brains.  How is this possible?   How can meaningful ideas arise from neurons, even billions of them?   How can language, with its intricate structure, be a product of a physical brain? If all ideas are physical, what are abstract ideas, like freedom and morality? We are approaching an answer.       

Lakoff's current research covers many areas of Conceptual Analysis within Cognitive Linguistics: (i) The nature of human conceptual systems, especially metaphor systems for concepts such as time, events, causation, emotions, morality, the self, politics, etc. May 26th, 2011