Noam Chomsky and Generative Grammar

Described in the book ‘Syntactic Structures’ by Chomsky (1957)

Chomsky claimed the linguistic theory is mentalistic, concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior. Ling theory must be concerned with competence first – with an ideal speaker-hearer in a completely homogenous community, who knows his l-ge perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, shifts of attention, errors in applying his knowledge of l-ge on actual speech.

The Contemporary Scene

What's the scene today? A very lively but confused picture of new dimensions, difficulties and antagonisms. One comparatively new approach is that of brain physiology. Much, perhaps the greater part, remains to be understood of precisely how the brain functions. But it is clear that consciousness (being aware of the world, having mental images, and feelings and intentions) proceeds by a complex system of neural loops and feedbacks.

Language allows us to elaborate, refine, connect, create and remember. All this happens together. {13} Animals learn as they need to. Dogs, for example, reared in total isolation, have no understanding of pain and will sniff repeatedly at a lighted match. And for human beings the sense of self comes through the joint development of social and linguistic behaviour, each operating on the other, so that attempts to study speech in narrow disciplines — physiology, psychology, linguistics, information theory, structuralism , etc. — are doomed to failure.

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