Вы находитесь на странице: 1из 11

Prof.

Farrell Educ 4290

In the 1920s the main linguistics interest was on the study of phonology and morphology, nothing else was important. 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 ardent proponents 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 conceptions were about to change by Noam

In the 1940s, Noam Chomsky starting with his work as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania he began developing a theory under which all languages have a basic syntactic 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 language and tied up to local cultures. He thought that languages word order patterns/ syntax had certain things in common, that suggested to Chomsky that there is some kind of mental hardwiring that is innate to human beings.

According to Chomsky, that which allows us (human beings) to generate sentences and which determines what the word order is in different languages is not cultural. His theory was and is that, there is something actually imprinted in our brains , in our DNA that codes us humans the ability to use and process the syntax of language. Basically to Chomsky all the different syntax in the world languages, us humans, must have been born with a universal syntax encoded in the neurons of our brains. To support his theory he published in 1957 his book

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

Chomsky and people his age came along and turn the whole linguistics field upside down. For Chomsky and his followers syntax was something totally separate from phonology , morphology, and particularly semantics.

Before Chomsky the general idea among linguistics was that, expressing meaning and syntax were more or less the same process. However, Chomsky pointed out there for the first time that there was a difference between semantics (the study of meaning) and syntax (word order) than has often been done. To demonstrate his point he used two examples:
1. You can say, The dog bit the man and The man was bitten by the dog. Both sentences have the same meaning, but different syntax. 2. He also said that, a sentence can be syntactically well-formed and semantically meaningless, such as the sentence:

Therefore, Chomskys theory proposed, that there is something , which we called syntax, which is worthy of study and which is going on in our brains on a different level or different module from where meaning (semantics) is taking place. Chomskys basic idea was that the process of generating grammatical sentences is innate, and called it universal grammar, and any human being has it. For example: A Russian is born with some innate ability to understand Russian, but that all human beings are born with the ability , because children of any country learn the language that they are raised with, and they do it quicky.

One of Chomskys crucial insights was that children do not make all the mistakes that we would expect them to.
1.

2.

3. 4.

For example, to make a sentence into a question, in English we change the order of the subject and the auxiliary, such as: The man is Tall. Is the man tall? Also, to make the sentence, The man who is tall is sad into a question, we say, Is the man who is tall sad? (switch the order of the subject and the auxiliary). Is appears twice in the sentence, but we do not put the first is up front and say , Is the man who tall is sad? This is because who is tall is nested within the sentence as a kind of sub-sentence, and we extract the second is.

No one teaches children such a thing--and yet children do not start out trying sentences like, Is the man who tall is sad? Chomsky argues then, that this is because we are born with an innate mental configuration to learn and produce language with this kind of nested structure. This hierarchical 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 a certain levelliterally be genetically programmed to readily understand, although not being able to put it in so many words-that there are possible sentences within sentences.

Chomskyan syntax has worked out a formal representation of how sentences are represented in the brain in structure-dependent fashion. This representation is in the form of trees , in which words 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 of diagramming the sentence. The idea is that this kind of structure is something

The Chomskyan revolution was to study syntax as something autonomous from, in particular, meaning and semantics; And to propose, that there is an innate capacity for learning, processing, and producing syntax of a particular kind that is universal to our species. In sum, his idea is that we are born with a sensitivity to an innate kind of structure, with a propensity to express language with this particular kind of structure. Chomsky called, Universal Grammar.

Вам также может понравиться