Generative Semantics & Transformational Grammar

Chomskyan Formalism

Born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928, Noam Chomsky was an intellectual prodigy who went on to earn a PhD in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1955, he has been a professor at MIT and has produced groundbreaking, controversial theories on human linguistic capacity. Chomsky is widely published, both on topics in his field and on issues of dissent and U.S. foreign policy.

Early life

Noam Chomsky was a brilliant child, and his curiosities and intellect were kindled greatly by his early experiences. Born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928, Chomsky felt the weight of America's Great Depression. By the age of 10, while attending a progressive school that emphasized student self-actualization, Chomsky had written a student newspaper editorial on the rise of fascism in Europe after the Spanish Civil War. Amazingly, his story was substantially researched enough to be the basis for a later essay he would present at New York University.

Chomsky’s current political views spring from this type of lived-experience stance, positing that all people can understand politics and economics and make their own decisions, and that authority ought to be tested before being deemed legitimate and worthy of power.

Undergraduate

Just as World War II was coming to a close, Chomsky began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He found little use for his classes until he met Zellig S. Harris, an American scholar touted for discovering structural linguistics (breaking language down into distinct parts or levels). Chomsky was moved by what he felt language could reveal about society. Harris introduced Chomsky to Nathan Fine, a Harvard mathematician, and two philosophers, Nelson Goodman and Nathan Salmon. Although an industrious student of Goodman, Chomsky drastically disagreed with his approach. Goodman believed the human mind was a blank slate, whereas Chomsky believed the basic concepts of language were innate in every human’s mind and then only influenced by one’s syntactical environment.

As a professor, he introduced transformational grammar to the field. His theory asserts that languages are innate and that the differences we see are only due to parameters developed over time in our brains, helping to explain why children are able to learn different languages more easily than adults.

Chomsky continued at the University of Pennsylvania and executed some of his research and writing at Harvard University. His dissertation eventually explored several linguistic ideas he would soon lay out in one of his best-known books on linguistics,Syntactic Structures (1957).

The formalism of context-free grammars was developed in the mid-1950s by Noam Chomsky, and also their classification as a special type of formal grammar (which he called phrase-structure grammars).

Formal language theory, the discipline which studies formal grammars and languages, is a branch of applied mathematics. Its applications are found in theoretical computer science, theoretical linguistics, formal semantics, mathematical logic, and other areas.

The linguistic formalism derived from Chomsky can be characterized by a focus on innate universal grammar (UG), and a disregard for the role of stimuli. The formalist propositions regarding innateness and stimuli do fit extensively with the cognitive opposition to behaviouristic psychology.

Leonard Bloomfield

·         Mentalism and behaviorism have at least three things to be involved: outside speakers, inside speakers and speech.

·         Outside speakers, inside speakers and speech could be discussed as ecological systems, distinct from each other because of the point of view taken an odd result, since the need for a point of view should not arise, and the perennial disputes between rival conceptions would be even more puzzling.

·         Science itself was of an intellectual, logically deductive enterprise.

·         Mentalism was clearly out of step with empirical science defined by Positivists.

·         Speech-behavior is labeled a substitute response to an immediate outside speaker stimulus; inside speaker also is a substitute stimulus for outside speaker responses otherwise occasioned by outside speaker stimuli.

·         Speech is taken to be an objectively observable activity of an organism, a succession of substitute stimuli and responses.

·         Inside speaker was seen as really no more than a spatially isolable part of outside speaker, individually shaped as its own piece of the entire ecology by social conditioning.

·         Language con be seen as the totally of mutually effective substitute responses.

·         Mentalism is dualistic, it recognizes two kinds of data, experience, perception, insight, causality, evidence, explanation, study goals and methods of study.

·         Behaviorims is monistic, it admits only a single kind of data, erroneously distinguished by mentalist into experience, insight, perception, causality.

·         The literary standard is accessible through general or personal educational effort, transcends geographic and social barriers, and is used on occasions described as formal.

·         The colloquial standard is observed in situations lacking formal behaviors among observably privileged classes within a larger speech.

·         The provincial standard is observed among those remote geographically from the formative environments of cultural centers.

·         Phonetics demonstrates that actual sounds lack clear-cut phonetic differences, even when refined discrimination is possible in the laboratory.

·         Contrasts are differences that count, since a pair of languages might have the same phonetic inventory, yet be differently structured.

·         Linguistic form is the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer.

·         Borrowing is to provide an objective way of describing linguistic and cultural contact, influence and evaluation.

The London School

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The London School

From the sixteenth century onwards, England was remarkable for the extent to which various aspects of ‘practical linguistics’ flourished here.

One consequence of this tradition for the pure academic discipline of linguistics which emerged in Britain in our own time was an emphasis on phonetics. Phonetic study in the modern sense was pioneered by Henry Sweet (1845-1912).

He was actively concerned with systematizing phonetic transcription in connection with problems of language-teaching and of spelling reform. Sweet was among the early advocates of the notion of the phoneme, which for him was a matter of practical importance as the unit which should be symbolized in an ideal system of orthography.

Sweet’s general approach to phonetics was continued by Daniel Jones (1881-1967), who took the subject up as a hobby, suggested to the authorities of University Collage, London that they ought to consider teaching the phonetics of French.

Daniel Jones stressed the importance for language study of thorough training in the practical skills of perceiving, transcribing, and reproducing minute distinctions of speech-sound; he invented the system of cardinal reference-points which made precise and consistent transcription possible in the case of vowels. Thanks to the traditions established by Sweet and Jones, the ‘ear-training’ aspect of phonetics plays a large part in university courses in linguistics in Britain, and British linguistics research tends to be informed by meticulous attention to phonetic detail.

The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized, distinct academic subject in Britain was J.R. Firth (1890-1960). He, in 1944, became the first Professor of General Linguistics in Great Britain, in the School of Oriental and African Studies (college of the University of London).

Firth’s own theorizing concerned mainly phonology and semantics, which we shall consider in that order.

One of the principal features of Firth’s treatment of phonology is that it is polysystemic.

Polysystemic principle ignores a generalization about human language which is valid as a statistical tendency even if not as an absolute rule. Firth’s theory could be said to meet Chomsky’s goal of providing simple descriptions for relatively ‘natural’ languages and complex descriptions for less natural languages.

A Firthian phonological analysis recognizes a number of ‘systems’ of prosodies operating at various points in structure which determine the pronunciation of a given form in interaction with segment-sized phonematic units that represent whatever information is left when all the co-occurrence restrictions between adjacent segments have been abstracted out as prosodies. The syllable plays an essential role as the domain of a large number of prosodies.

Also, Firth insisted that sound and meaning in language were more directly related that they usually taken to be. For Firth, a phonology was a structure of systems of choices, and systems of choices were systems of meaning.

To understand Firth’s notion of meaning, we must examine the linguistic ideas of his colleague Bronislaw Malinowsky (1884-1942). The most important aspect of Malinowski’s theorizing, as distinct from his purely ethnographic work, concerned the functioning of language. For Malinowski’s, to think of language as a ‘means of transfusing ideas from the head of the speaker to that of the listener’ was a misleading myth; to speak, particularly in a primitive culture, is not to tell but to do.

Words are tools, and the ‘meaning’ of a tool is its use.

Malinowski clarifies his idea of meaning by appealing to a notion of ‘context situation’.

To understand an utterance in an alien language is not just to equate it with some element of one’s own language but is rather to know its position in a complex network of sense-relationships which it contracts with other elements of the alien language.

-London approach to syntax

This draws heavily on Firthian principles which we have already encountered in connection with phonological analysis, but the application of these principles to syntax has been carried out by successors of Firth, notably Michael Hallyday, once Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Sydney. Syntactic analysis in the London style is commonly called ‘systemic grammar’. A ‘system’ in Firthian language, remember, is a mutually exclusive options that come into play at some point in a linguistic structure. This is the clue to London School syntax: like Firthian phonology, it is primarily concerned with the nature and import of the various choices which one makes in deciding to utter one particular sentence out of the infinitely numerous sentences that one’s language makes available.

In a systemic grammar, the central component is a chart of the full set of choices available in constructing a sentence, with a specification of the relationships between choices.

So in syntax the London School is more interested in stating the range of options open to the speaker than in specifying how any particular set of choices form the range available is realized as a sequence of words.

Margaret Berry’s introduction to systemic theory makes the astute point that, while Chomskyan linguistics appeals to the psychologist, systemic linguistics is more relevant for the sociologist. The sociologist wants to be able to describe any patterns that emerge in the particular choices that given types of individual make in given circumstances from the overall range provided by their language.

Hallyday introduces into syntax the notions ‘rank’ and ‘delicacy’. ‘Rank refers to a scale of sizes of grammatical unit, roughly speaking: the lowest-ranking unit is the morpheme, the highest-ranking is the sentence.

As for ‘delicacy’, this is a scale of relative preciseness of grammatical statement.

The major difficulty in systemic grammar concerns the essential role that intuition appears to play in systemic analysis.

The London School crossword puzzle game

The London School crossword puzzle game

Copenhagen School

Here you have a little map mind about main concepts on Copenhagen School. As you know they were influenced by the Prague School but they made a better or more functional study of the language

Copenhagen School hangman game

's certificate on Copenhagen School hangman game