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N. Chomsky Theory

Linguistic Theories of Noam Chomsky

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36 views

N. Chomsky Theory

Linguistic Theories of Noam Chomsky

Uploaded by

Pınar Erdaş
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© © All Rights Reserved
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THE LINGUISTIC THEORY OF A.

NOAM CHOMSKY

Sources:

1. Graffi, G. (2006). 20th-Century Linguistics: Overview of Trends. In: Keith Brown, (Editor-in-Chief)
Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, Second Edition, volume 13, pp. 181-195. Oxford:
Elsevier.
2. Munkerud, E. (2011). Chomsky’s Methodological Naturalism and its Bearing on Referential
Semantics, Master Thesis, University of Oslo.
3. Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N. Fitch, & W. T. (2002). How Did It Evolve? The Faculty of Language:
What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve? Science 298, pp. 1569-1579.

Short Biography:

Born on December 7, 1928 (age 94 years), Avram Noam Chomsky is an American public intellectual: a
linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Student of Zellig
Harris. Revolutionized linguistic theory in the mid-20 th century. Sometimes called the father of modern
linguistics. (Source: https://chomsky.info/)

Influenced by Cartesian Dualism/Descartes (in mentalism), Port Royal transformationism (in the
relation between surface and deep structures), and Wilhelm von Humboldt (in linguistic creativity)

A. Key notions to discuss relevant to Chomskian linguistics

- Biolinguistic approach (organ resemblance-language is a biological organ) to language


- Faculty psychology as a discipline that is relevant to understanding the operations of the
language faculty (language is a faculty of the mind)
- Methodological Naturalism- MN involves at least three core ideas: That the study of mental (and
linguistic) phenomena should be approached in the same way as we approach other aspects of
“the natural world”, that our aim is to provide theories that have explanatory (as opposed to
merely descriptive) value, and that we seek to integrate these theories with theories in the
“core” natural sciences (like biology).
- A hierarchical organization of syntax (as opposed to the chain syntax proposed by behaviourists)
- Rationalism – language capacity is innate (as opposed to behaviourism/empiricim)
- Language acquisition: Children are born with a knowledge of the principles of the grammatical
structure of all languages, and this inborn knowledge explains the success and speed with which
they learn language. Poverty of Stimulus argument tells why behavioral account of language
learning fails.
- Competence vs. Performance (C: the speaker–hearer’s knowledge of his language; P: the actual
use of language in concrete situations)
- Grammar described: Set of rules that specify how surface structure of sentences relate to their
deep structures. The grammar consists of surface structures - the sounds and words in a
sentence - and deep structures that contain the meaning of the sentence. The meaning is
converted by a transformation to a surface structure.
- Universal Grammar: “system of categories, mechanisms and constraints shared by all human
languages and considered to be innate” (e.g. recursion: the ability to generate infinitely long
sentences by using recursive constructs of human language such as conjunctions)
- Creative ability: Knowing a language means being able to produce an infinite number of
sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before. Chomsky
refers to this ability as the "creative aspect" of language.
- Linguistic Intuition: Native speakers' intuitive judgments about well-formedness of sentences
(Acceptability judgements of ideal speakers/hearers in a homogenous speech community)
- Description of human language (based on Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch, 2002)
Human language: discrete infinity
Primate communication along with many other animal communication systems: discrete finitude
Many forms of bird and bee communication: infinite divisibility

sensory-motor system -------------- conceptual intentional system


SYNTAX (Merge operations/ +1)
The organization of human faculty of language: hierarchical, generative, recursive, and virtually
limitless with respect to its scope of expression.

B. Generative Grammar (GG)

The linguistic theory developed by the American scholar Noam Chomsky and his followers; ‘‘a system of
rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences”.

He adopted a ‘mentalistic’ approach to the problems of language and knowledge, as opposed to the
behavioristic one.

Syntactic Structures (Chomsky, 1957), in opposition to the American Structural Linguistics, characterizes
the main features of linguistic description as follows:

1. The goal of linguistic description is no more seen in the analysis of a given corpus, but in the
accounting for the intuitions of the native speaker of a given language (well-formedness of
sentences.
2. IC-analysis typical of American structuralism is formalized in a system of rules called Phrase-
structure (PS) grammar.
3. PS-grammar is shown not able to adequately account for all sentences of any natural language.

e.g. The connection between sentences such as:

Mary gave a book to John and John was given a book by Mary, or between the latter and Who was

given a book by Mary?

4. Transformations are needed to explain such relationships (PS grammar cannot capture these
relations).

Standard Theory

 Modification of the earlier theory by Chomsky and his colleagues (1955-1965): The Standard
Theory
 The application of transformational rules to deep structure produces surface structures. PS-rules,
lexical rules, and transformations form the syntactic component of grammar.
 Deep structures are interpreted by the semantic component, giving the semantic representation
of sentences; and surface structures are interpreted by the phonological component, giving the
phonetic representation.

Competence vs. performance

Chomsky contrasted competence, defined as ‘‘the speaker–hearer’s knowledge of his language,’’ to


performance, which is defined as ‘‘the actual use of language in concrete situations.’’

The linguist has to discover ‘‘the underlying system of rules’’ (i.e., the competence) ‘‘from the data of
performance’’ (Chomsky, 1965: 4). A grammar that correctly describes the competence of a native
speaker of a given language is said to be descriptively adequate.

The task of linguistic theory is that of accounting for the properties of the LAD (Language Acquisition
Device), i.e., the device that allows the child to construct a grammar from among a set of possible
alternatives.

The impact of GG and the notions that were criticized:

Generative grammar (or, more exactly, generative syntax) aroused great interest among linguists shortly
after the publication of Chomsky (1957).

Generative tenets were not accepted by everybody. Some ideas of Chomsky that were extensively
discussed were:

(1) The mentalistic view of linguistics, which was later called cognitive.
Point of criticism: It was opposed to the prevailing structuralist methodology in Europe and
America. Structuralists considered linguistics as an autonomous science, but Chomsky related it
to cognitive psychology.
(2) The assumption that linguistic theory has to deal with ‘an ideal speaker–hearer,’ within a
‘homogeneous linguistic community.
Point of criticism: The social and communicative aspects of language influence its structure, but
Chomskian theory does not take these into account. Also, the notion of ideal speaker and
homogenous speech community were criticized.
(3) The notion of Universal Grammar (UG), drawing on the general and rational grammar of Port
Royal School. UG is a product of the LAD; it is universal since it would be shared by all human
beings
Point of criticism: What if a feature that is postulated as universal in all human language does
not appear in particular languages? The example of Piraha language).
(4) The postulation of two different levels of representation (deep and surface structure).
Point of criticism: Such a distinction was regarded by some scholars as unnecessary. Several one-
level approaches to syntax were proposed later (e.g. lexical functional grammar)
C. The syntax programs that Chomsky developed:

1. Transformational generative grammar


2. Standard theory, 1960s
3. Extended standard theory (EST), 1970s
EST’s main concern was the definition of restrictions
on the functioning and on the format of syntactic
rules (constraints on
the format of transformational rules).
4. Principles and Parameters or ‘Government-Binding Theory’ (GB-Theory), from the early 1980s:
The Principles and Parameters approach was the first real effort made within the Chomskyan
program to provide a systematic account of cross-linguistic differences. The universal features of
language were named principles, and the dimensions along which languages can vary,
parameters.
5. The Minimalist Program (MP), 1990s:
Leading criterion was considered to be economy, namely resorting to the least possible number
of entities and of levels of representation.

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