语言学-chomsky

T eamwork---Linguistic Course By:Business English Class 1---Group 4

Task:Survey on Noam Chomsky

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Noam Chomsky

Brief Introduction:

●中文名：诺姆·乔姆斯基

●外文名：Noam Chomsky

●国籍：美国

●出生地：美国宾夕法尼亚州的费

城

●出生日期：1928年12月7日

●职业：学术人物语言学家

●毕业院校：宾夕法尼亚大学

●主要成就：语言学家，转换-生

成语法创始人

●代表作品：《现代希伯莱语语素

音位学》《转换分析》《句法结构》

Chomsky’s Revolution in Linguistic

“转换生成语法”（Transformashionl Generative 自20世纪50年代中期开始，

Grammar，简称TG）取代描写语言学，成为美国语言学的主流。转换生成理论很快发展成为现代欧美语言学中最有影响的一种理论。①

乔姆斯基是一位富有探索精神的语言学家。他的父亲是希伯来语学者。受其影响，乔姆斯基最初把兴趣点放在研究希伯来语上。他用结构主义的方法研究希伯莱语，后来发现这种方法有很大的局限性，转而探索新的方法，逐步建立起转换－生成语法，1957年出版的《句法结构》就是这一新方法的标志。可这种用离散数学方法研究句法结构的方法论早在1930年便由鲁道夫·卡尔纳(Rudolph Car nap)提出。转换规则由乔姆斯基的老师Zellig Harris提出。而形态音位规则（Morphophonemic’s rule）则与布费尔德学派如出一辙。乔姆斯基在《句法结构》一书中只是将这三种早已存在的研究方法进行了综合。这种分析方法风靡全世界，冲垮了结构语言学的支配地位，因而被人们称为"乔姆斯基革命"。

后来他又不断丰富和发展转换－生成语法的理论和方法，相继发表了《句法理论要略》、《深层结构、表层结构和语义解释》、《支配和约束论集》等重要著作，对世界语言学的发展方向产生了巨大的影响。现在，转换-生成语法仍在继续发展之中。

①徐志民：《欧美语言学简史》2005年8月第一版，第269页。

Contributions to Linguistic

Syntactic Structures was a distillation of his book Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955) in which he introduces transformational grammars. The theory takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax which can be (largely) characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a Context-free grammar extended with transformational rules. Children are hypothesized to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all human languages (i.e. they assume that any language which they encounter is of a certain restricted kind).This innate knowledge is often referred to as universal grammar.①It is argued that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" of language: with a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms, humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including sentences no one has previously said.

The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P) —developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB) —make strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (The term principles and parameters, given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.

Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.

More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters" , Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping it from all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design , reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.

①参阅莱昂斯《乔姆斯基评传》，第91-92页。