Kertész The Historiography of Generative Linguistics

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0068-7
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 210 Seiten

Although the past decades have seen a great diversity of approaches to the history of generative linguistics, there has been no systematic analysis of the state of the art. The aim of the book is to fill this gap. Part I provides an unbiased, balanced and impartial overview of numerous approaches to the history of generative linguistics. In addition, it evaluates the approaches thus discussed against a set of evaluation criteria. Part II demonstrates in a case study the workability of a model of plausible argumentation that goes beyond the limits of current historiographical approaches. Due to the comprehensive analysis of the state of the art, the book may be useful for graduate and undergraduate students. However, since it is also intended to enrich the historiography of linguistics in a novel way, the book may also attract the attention of both linguists interested in the history of science, and historians of science interested in linguistics.

András Kertész is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Debrecen, Hungary. He is an ordinary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and of Academia Europaea.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kertész, András

Leseproben

2.2 ›Aspects of the Theory of Syntax‹ (Chomsky 1965)
2.2.0 Background information
In between the appearance of Syntactic Structures and his next influential book, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Chomsky published his review of Skinner’s (1957) Verbal Behavior. The main characteristics of the review are as follows: Chomsky launched a fierce attack on behaviorism which had also been presupposed in Bloomfieldian and neo-Bloomfieldian linguistics. He argued for his assumption that verbal behavior (in the sense of behaviorism) cannot be understood without understanding grammar (as a mental capacity).1 At the same time, he was one of those who initiated the treatment of grammar as the result of mental processes, thus contributing to what came to be known in the 1960s as mentalism and later as cognitivism.2 He drew an analogy between the native speaker’s knowledge of grammar and the linguist’s scientific knowledge of grammar, and assumed that the former can be treated as a theory as well.3 In this review he also maintained that grammar should be capable of explaining how the child acquires the grammar of her language.4 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax carried on central insights of the review and by integrating further findings it became what, according to Boeckx (2006: 17), »arguably remains to this day the clearest statement of the generative enterprise as a whole«. This work put forward the following main ideas: The »fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations)« was introduced (Chomsky 1965: 4; emphasis as in the original). The object of investigation is the ideal speaker-hearer’s competence.5 The grammars of particular languages are supplemented by universal grammar.6 The grammar includes a semantic, a phonological and a syntactic component. The semantic and the phonological component are purely interpretive. Then, »the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation. The first of these is interpreted by the semantic component; the second, by the phonological component.« (Chomsky 1965: 16; italics as in the original) The deep structure is constituted of a set of basic phrase markers. »In addition to its base, the syntactic component of a generative grammar contains a transformational subcomponent. This is concerned with generating a sentence, with its surface structure, from its basis.« (Chomsky 1965: 17) The central problem is that of language acquisition as already raised in the review of Skinner’s book. Aspects specifies this problem by introducing the term ›language acquisition device‹.7 The latter is a theoretical construct referring hypothetically to a tool that helps children acquire the grammar of their language, starting from what is called ›primary linguistic data‹ (i.e. the data available to the child during language acquisition) and resulting in the correct grammar of that language. The linguist’s task is to explain this process.8 Thereby, the difficulty is that no inductive procedure can explain how a child succeeds in acquiring a grammar of high complexity in a very short time.9 Therefore, it is to be assumed that the child has already innate universal predispositions that enable her to select the correct grammar compatible with the primary linguistic data.10 Grammars should be evaluated by three standards, called levels of adequacy. A grammar is observationally adequate if it correctly accounts for the data which are the input to language acquisition. A grammar is »descriptively adequate to the extent that it correctly describes the intrinsic competence of the idealized native speaker« (Chomsky 1965: 24). Finally, it is explanatorily adequate if it explains how the child arrives at her grammar on the basis of linguistic evidence she observes in language acquisition.11 In the 1960s a heated debate took place between Chomsky and a group of his disciples, primarily George Lakoff, John R. Ross, James D. McCawley and Paul Postal, on the status of semantics in grammar. The latter questioned the interpretive role of semantics as indicated above, and instead regarded semantics as the generative component of grammar. They argued for another model of grammar in which surface structures are derived from semantic structures. Thus, deep structure seemed to be, for them, no well-motivated component of the grammar. Eventually the generative semantics movement fell apart and Chomsky’s position retained dominance. 2.2.1 Kuhnian revolution
Although it follows from Newmeyer’s (1986b), Koerner’s (1989), (2002), (2004), Murray’s (1980), (1994), (1999a), Seuren’s (1998) and Harris’s (1993a) claims that the appearance of Syntactic Structures did not trigger a Kuhnian scientific revolution in linguistics, it does not follow that later stages of generative linguistics could not have been revolutionary. As early as the 1970s consideration was given to the assumption that it was Aspects (Chomsky 1965) that bore revolutionary characteristics in the Kuhnian sense rather than Syntactic Structures. Thus the next thesis is the following: (T12) It was Aspects of the Theory of Syntax that triggered a scientific revolution in linguistics and led to the birth of a new paradigm. McCawley (1976: 4–5) argues for this thesis by making reference to three factors: By the mid-sixties, the number of adherents of generative transformational grammar – originally a small minority of linguists – had greatly increased. Generative transformational grammar developed from an avantgarde...