The Chomskian Perspective on Language Study.ppt

Introduction: The Chomskian Perspective on Language Study What does a grammar mean?(Berk 1999) Prescriptive Grammars In the old time, the term grammar refers to set of prescriptive rules, i.e. rules that dictate which forms and structures are “correct” and which are not. “Correctness” was associated with the forms and structures of classical Latin. But, unfortunately, English and Latin are only remotely related and the two languages are very different structurally. Descriptive Grammars In the 19th and 20th centuries, Western scholars began to study languages that were hitherto unfamiliar to Europeans and most North Americans. Description, not prescription, became the goal of those who were seeking to write grammars for those previously unrecorded languages. Because of this, linguists revolutionalized the study of English as well. By the 1930s, a strong tradition of descriptive linguists stood in opposition to the traditional prescriptive approach. Chomsky’s revolution(Berk 1999) In 1957, Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, a book that launched another revolution in the study of grammar. Chomsky called his approach generative grammar and his goal was to provide the structural descriptions necessary to generate all the grammatical sentences and only the grammatical sentences in a given language. Chomsky’s approach went well beyond description; he hoped to formalize the system of unconscious rules that we all exploit in speaking our native language. The ultimate goal Chomsky’s framework has is to explain how language is acquired. Chomsky’s work has had a profound impact on the study of syntax and today there are a number of formal theoretical models which owe some debt to Chomsky’s generative grammars. Three Questions Formal grammar vs. Functional grammar(Berk 1999) Formal grammars were criticized as only focusing on sentences in isolation. In the late 1970s and 1980s, functional grammars were developed in order to explore rules that gover