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Mid to late 20th century:

Generative linguistics and the search for universals


Chomsky is one o the most influential linguists of history. He transferred linguistics from a relatively obscured discipline into a major social science of direct relevance to other disciplines. He shifted attention away from detailed description of actual expression and started asking questions about the nature of the system which produces the output.

According to Chomsky, Bloomfield linguistics was far too ambitious and had a limited scope. It was too ambitious because it was unrealistic to expected to lay down rules for extracting a perfect description of language. Its was too limited because it concentarated on describing sets of utterances which happened to have been spoken.

Chomsky believed that a grammar should be more then a mere description of old utterances but it should also take into account possible future utterance

Chomsky pointed out that anyone who nows a language must have internalized a set o rules which specifies the sequences patterend in their language.

Transformational generative grammer

Universal Grammer:

The 21st century: Future trends


Chomsky directed attention towards the language potential of human beings. rather then a detailed description of linguistic minutiae. As a result huge amount of other disciplines started taking interest in language and linguistics.

The optimality theory:


Suggests that there are no fixed bounds in language. Instead universal language consists of violable constraints. Each language varies in its ranking due to these constraints. The difference between the ranking then gives a rise to different patterns, resulting in variations between languages.

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