noam chomsky and the chomskyan revolution

8/3/2019 Noam Chomsky and the Chomskyan Revolution

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Prof. FarrellEduc 4290


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In the 1920s the main linguistics interest was on thestudy of phonology and morphology, nothing else wasimportant.

There were two reasons for this:

o 1915, as a linguist you were really more like an anthropologist.Viewing language as an independent growth, rooted partly in its

speakers culture and partly in chance.

Edwar Sapir (1884-1939) & Franz Boas (1858-1942) where

ardentproponents of the validity of all human cultures, rejecting

everything

concerning development.

o This was a time when psychologists were under the influence of

the behaviorism theory.All this conce tions were about to chan e b Noam


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In the 1940s, Noam Chomsky starting with his work as anundergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania he begandeveloping a theory under which all languages have a basicsyntactic configuration that we are mentally hardwired to

learn and use.

He started to look differently at what syntax was.

Instead of looking at syntax as a matter of each languageand tied up to local cultures.

He thought that languages word order patterns/ syntax had

certain things in common, that suggested to Chomsky thatthere is some kind of mental hardwiring that is innate tohuman beings.


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According to Chomsky, that which allows us (human

beings) to generate sentencesand which determineswhat the word order is in different languages is notcultural.

His theory was and is that, there is somethingactually imprinted in our brains , in our DNA thatcodes us humans the ability to use and process thesyntax of language.

Basically to Chomsky all the different syntax in the worldlanguages, us humans, must have been born with auniversal syntax encoded in the neurons of ourbrains.

To support his theory he published in 1957 his book


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The book , Syntactic Structures, started a revolution ofall sorts in the study of linguistics. Within 10 years, thisnew approach to syntax became the dominant one inlinguistics, and it is taught universally today.

Chomsky and people his age came along and turn thewhole linguistics field upside down.

For Chomsky and his followerssyntaxwas somethingtotally separate from phonology , morphology, andparticularly semantics.


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Before Chomsky the general idea among linguistics wasthat, expressing meaning and syntax were more or lessthe same process.

However, Chomsky pointed out there for the first time thatthere was a difference between semantics (the study ofmeaning) and syntax (word order) than has often beendone.

To demonstrate his point he used two examples:

1.You can say, The dog bit the manand The man was bittenby the dog. Both sentences have the same meaning, butdifferent syntax.

2. He also said that, a sentence can be syntactically well-formedand semantically meaningless, such as the sentence:


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Therefore, Chomskys theory proposed, that there issomething , which we called syntax, which is worthy ofstudy and which is going on in our brains on adifferent level or different module from where

meaning (semantics) is taking place. Chomskys basic idea was that the process of

generating grammatical sentences isinnate, andcalled it universal grammar, and any human being hasit.

For example:A Russian is born with some innate ability tounderstand Russian, but that all human beings areborn with the ability , because children of any country

learn the language that they are raised with, and theydo it quicky.


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One of Chomskys crucial insightswas that children do

not make all the mistakes that we would expect themto.

1. For example, to make asentence into a question, in English

we change the order of the subject and the auxiliary, suchas: The man is Tall. Is the man tall?

2. Also, to make the sentence, The man who is tall is sad intoa question, we say, Is the man who is tall sad? (switch theorder of the subject and the auxiliary).

3. Isappears twice in the sentence, but we do not put the firstisup front and say , Is the man who tall is sad?

4. This is becausewho is tallis nested within the sentence asa kind of sub-sentence, andwe extract the second is.


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No one teaches children such a thing--and yet childrendo not start out trying sentences like,Is the man whotall is sad?

Chomsky argues then, that this is because we are bornwith an innate mental configuration to learn andproduce languagewith this kind of nested structure. Thishierarchical structure is the way that language built.

This means that when a child hears a sentence for the

first time like, Is the man sad? , he/she knows, on acertain levelliterally be genetically programmed toreadily understand, although not being able to put it in somany words-that there are possible sentences within

sentences.


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Chomskyan syntax has worked out a formalrepresentationof how sentences are represented in thebrain in structure-dependent fashion.

This representation is in the form of trees , in whichwords occur at the ends of the branches.

Example:

S (sentence)

N (noun) V(verb)

Bill walked away

The important thing is not just that this is a way ofdiagramming

the sentence. The idea is that this kind of structure is

something


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The Chomskyan revolutionwas to study syntaxassomething autonomous from, in particular, meaning andsemantics;

And to propose, that there is an innate capacity forlearning, processing, and producing syntaxof aparticular kind that is universal to our species.

In sum, his idea is that we are born with a sensitivityto an innate kind of structure, with a propensity to

express language with this particular kind ofstructure.

Chomsky called, Universal Grammar.

noam chomsky and the chomskyan revolution

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