Greg Detre
Thursday, 14 March, 2002
Sapir was more of a humanist, placing linguistics in the context of �soft� sciences like psychology and anthropology
Bloomfield tried to make linguistics more scientific. agreed with Watson that thought is just a kind of concealed musculature
they considered meaning to be unimportant
describes how Chomsky came out of the Bloomfieldian behaviourist tradition but has come to describe himself as more of a �mentalist�, insofar as he allows for mental states (although they need not be dualistically non-physical at all, just not mechanistically determinist)
he attacked behaviourism early on, especially with regard to its inability to explain �creativity� in language (i.e. our ability to produce and comprehend an infinite number of sentences, most of which are genuinely new, i.e. never uttered before)
followed Boas in emphasising the diversity of different languages
duality of structure � phonemes/morphemes
Lyons considers Chomsky�s major achievement to lie in his formalisation of grammars, even if his own transformational grammar is eventually shown empirically to be wrong, or supplanted by a better theory
performance/competence distinction � defined �competence� contentiously (and perhaps too restrictively as what a perfect/native speaker in a homologous language community would consider grammatically correct
in his 1957 Syntactic Structures, he described three increasingly powerful descriptions of language
finite state grammar
from left to right, choose next word based on the words that have come before
allows for loops
not powerful enough for English, because it doesn't allow for non-adjacent dependent words
phrase grammar
powerful enough for English, but Chomsky thinks that it doesn't parallel the intuitions of native speakers
i.e. its characterisation of constructions (e.g. passive) fails to show up underlying similarities
transformational grammar
like phrase grammar, but with an extra set of (optional + obligatory) transformation rules applied afterwards
in Aspects of a theory of syntax (1965) he says that the �deep� base component is processed in two directions: towards a semantic component, and eventually towards a phonological component (via a �surface� transformational component)
the �generative semantics� school holds that the deep structure is itself the semantic representation
but transformational grammar is too powerful � the important thing is to eventually come up with a grammar that generates �all and only� the sentences of a given language
deepness doesn't necessarily correspond to the number of transformational rules � it�s a measure of how much it tells us about the nature of mind
linguistics is about discovering what is essential about all human languages
argues that there must be some sort of genetically-bestowed language acquisition device (LAD) to explain Plato�s problem (anamnesia) of how human languages share so many underlying structural similarities, are of roughly similar complexity (arguably), infants acquire them so fast despite poverty of stimulus, and creoles appear