Noam Chomsky is an American linguist whose 1957 monograph Syntactic Structures founded generative grammar, the proposal that a speaker's grammatical competence is a finite system of formal rules capable of generating an unbounded number of well-formed sentences, including ones never previously spoken or heard. His subsequent argument that the human capacity for language is substantially innate, rather than learned purely from environmental input, reoriented linguistics away from the behaviorist and purely descriptive approaches that had dominated the field, and remains among the most debated positions in the philosophy of language and cognitive science.
Facts
RoleLinguist, Founder of Generative Grammar 2 Noam Chomsky
Filter Results2 entries
Connections
Associated With
Martinet functionalist approach to syntax led to a public and sustained disagreement with Chomsky generative program, not a shared school.
Source Wikipedia: Andre Martinet
Source Syntactic StructuresNoam Chomsky
Influenced
Partee earned her PhD at MIT under Noam Chomsky in 1965; widely documented in her own biographical accounts.
Critiqued Here
Daniel Everett, Linguists Everett fieldwork on Piraha, which he argued lacked recursion, was framed as a direct challenge to Chomsky universal-grammar claim that recursion is a linguistic universal.
Eve V. Clark, Linguists Clark engages directly with Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device, arguing it must be reformulated to include semantics.
Influenced By
Chomsky credited Jespersen's ideas on syntax as anticipating later generative approaches.
Source Wikipedia: Otto Jespersen
Chomsky was Harris student at the University of Pennsylvania, and Harris distributional methods shaped Chomsky early transformational analysis before he developed generative grammar.
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Nationality, Noam Chomsky entity pageQuote, Nationality, Noam Chomsky entity page
Noam Chomsky is an American linguist whose 1957 monograph Syntactic Structures founded generative grammar, the proposal that a speaker's grammatical competence is a finite system of formal rules capable of generating an unbounded number of well-formed sentences, including ones never previously spoken or heard.
2. Syntactic Structures
Noam Chomsky, 1957
Wikipedia: Otto Jespersen
Wikimedia FoundationInfluenced By: Otto Jespersen, General syntax sectionQuote, Influenced By: Otto Jespersen, General syntax section
the work of recent years tends generally to support the basic ideas that Jespersen outlined 50 years ago
Wikipedia: Andre Martinet
WikipediaAssociated With: Andre Martinet, Career significanceQuote, Associated With: Andre Martinet, Career significance
he is known for pioneering a functionalist approach to syntax, which led to a violent polemic with Noam Chomsky.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Chomsky argue in Syntactic Structures?
That grammatical competence is a finite rule system generating unlimited sentences, and that this capacity is substantially innate.
His 1957 monograph founded generative grammar: the proposal that a speaker's grammatical competence is a finite system of formal rules capable of generating an unbounded number of well-formed sentences, including ones never previously spoken or heard. Chomsky's subsequent argument that the human capacity for language is substantially innate, rather than learned purely from environmental input, reoriented linguistics away from the behaviorist and purely descriptive approaches that had dominated the field.
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