The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky

As did the first edition, this second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky includes specially written chapters that discuss topics in three of the important intellectual areas to which Noam Chomsky has made significant contributions. While contributors to the first edition wrote some of the chapters, most of the contributors to this second edition are new. All essays are new.

Again like the first edition, chapters are written for the intelligent general reader. Some of them assume a little technical knowledge, and a couple of them a bit more than that. No one should have much difficulty with the chapters in the philosophy of language/mind section or those in the politics one. But given that one of the aims of this new edition is to address changes and progress since 2005 in Chomsky’s work on the science of language, several of the authors who discuss Chomsky’s work in linguistics had to assume that readers would have at least some background knowledge of the topic(s) under discussion. Nevertheless, even readers new to Chomsky’s approach to the science of language who are willing to read carefully should be able to understand the issue(s) taken up in a particular linguistics chapter, with the possible exception of the last one. Those who want more background can go to the first four chapters in the linguistics section, and to all those in the first edition. And anyone who wants a brief introduction to the issue(s) in question in a particular chapter might find it in the summaries I provide in Part 3 of this introduction.