- Talking about Chomsky!!

Mid-to late-20th century: generative linguistics and the search for universals

In 1957, linguistics took a new turning. Noam Chomsky, then aged tweny-nine, a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a book called Syntactic Structures.

Chomsky is the most influential linguistic of the century.

A grammar he claimed, should be more than a description of old utterances. Creativity, as he said, is the ability of guman beings to produce an comprehend and indefinite number of novel utterances. Chomsky points out that anyone who knows a language must have internalized a set of rules which specify the sequences permitted in their language.

A grammar which consist of a set of statements or rules which specify which sequences of a language are possible, and which impossible, is a generative grammar. The particular type of generative grammar favoured by Chomsky is a so-called transformational one.

He also redirected attention towards language universals. He points out that as all human are rather similar, their internalized language mechanisms are likely to have important common properties. He argues that linguistics should concentrate on finding elements and constructions that are available to all languages, whether or not they actually occur.