Noam Chomsky

American Linguist Philosopher Cognitive

Scientist

Historian Activist

Father of MODERN LINGUISTICS

• Theory of Transformative Generative Grammar:

• The way people learn to communicate• Description of the syntax process common to

all human languages• Differences:• Deep structure of the language• Surface structure

Principal Linguistic Work

• Syntactic Structures (1957)• Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964)• The Sound Pattern of English (Morris Halle-

1968)• Language and Mind (1972)• Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar

(1972)• Knowledge of (1986)

Transformational Generative Grammar

• Every intelligible sentence conforms not only to grammatical rules peculiar to its particular language, but also to "deep structures," a universal grammar underlying all languages and corresponding to an innate capacity of the human brain.

• Chomsky and other linguists who built on his work formulated transformational rules, which transform a sentence with a given grammatical structure (e.g., "John saw Mary") into a sentence with a different grammatical structure but the same essential meaning ("Mary was seen by John").

• Transformational linguistics has been influential in psycholinguistics, particularly in the study of language acquisition by children

• . In the 1990s Chomsky formulated a "Minimalist Program" in an attempt to simplify the symbolic representations of the language facility.

• The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.