乔姆斯基 普遍语法 5阶段

Chapter Three Major Developmental Phases of Chomsky's Linguistic Theory

Since the turning out of his first book Syntactic Structure in which he formulated his transformational grammar, Chomsky has updated his extensively-applied linguistic notions with more lectures given and books issued. It is commonly recognized to be five phases.

Phase One: Transformational Grammar

It is impossible to understand Chomsky’s linguistic notions without understanding his transformational grammar which is undoubtedly a milestone in the history of modern linguistics. Prior to the publication of Syntactic Structure in 1957, the linguistic study was mainly concerned with structuralism. Structural linguistics, with its insistence on objective methods of verification and precisely specified techniques of discovery, derives from the "behavioral sciences" approach to the study of man, and is also largely a consequence of the philosophical assumptions of logical positivism.

During that period, most American linguists, according to Chomsky，defined the task of linguistics as “collecting language elements and classifying them”(Chomsky 1970:100). The approach was the mechanic procedure to find the language truth and discipline. Linguistics was a kind of verbal botany. Linguists at that time were just giving a description of a language by colleting data, colleting a large number of utterances of language. These utterances were always recorded on a tape recorder or in a phonetic script. The second step was to classify these elements of language at different linguistic levels, from the units of sounds, the phonemes, to the morphemes, then to the sequences of word classes. The study target was the rich language elements and structuralism was inductive with a word-grammar.

However, with the language ability as the study target, TG aims to establish some theories, by means of which we can make sure which rules form the basis of language structure. The aim of linguistic theory was to provide the linguist with a set of rigorous methods, a set of discovery procedures which he would use to extract from the "corpus" the phonemes, the morphemes, and so on. Its approach is putting

forward hypothesis which is to be tested by native language speakers. Therefore, TG is a deductive language-category grammar which can explain infinite sentences with limited analyses.

John R. Searle concludes that:

Chomsky argued that since any language contains an infinite number of sentences, any "corpus," even if it contained as many sentences as there are in all the books of the Library of Congress, would still be trivially small. Instead of the appropriate subject matter of linguistics being a randomly or arbitrarily selected set of sentences, the proper object of study was the speaker's underlying knowledge of the language, his "linguistic competence" that enables him to produce and understand sentences he has never heard before.

(Searle 1972: 29)

Once the conception of the "corpus" as the subject matter is rejected, then the notion of mechanical procedures for discovering linguistic truths goes as well. Chomsky argues that no science has a mechanical procedure for discovering the truth anyway. Rather, what happens is that the scientist formulates hypotheses and tests them against evidence. Linguistics is no different: the linguist makes conjectures about linguistic facts and tests them against the evidence provided by native speakers of the language. He has in short a procedure for evaluating rival hypotheses, but no procedure for discovering true theories by mechanically processing evidence.

The Transformational Grammar can be expressed in the following way:

1 .Two levels of representation of the structure of sentences: an underlying, more abstract form, termed 'deep structure', and the actual form of the sentence produced, called 'surface structure'. Deep structure is represented in the form of a hierarchical tree diagram, or "phrase structure tree," depicting the abstract grammatical relationships between the words and phrases within a sentence.