Avram Noam Chomsky is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions and the media.
In linguistics, syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.
In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations to produce new sentences from existing ones.
In linguistics, X-bar theory is a model of phrase-structure grammar and a theory of syntactic category formation that was first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1970 reformulating the ideas of Zellig Harris (1951), and further developed by Ray Jackendoff, along the lines of the theory of generative grammar put forth in the 1950s by Chomsky. It attempts to capture the structure of phrasal categories with a single uniform structure called the X-bar schema, basing itself on the assumption that any phrase in natural language is an XP that is headed by a given syntactic category X. It played a significant role in resolving issues that phrase structure rules had, representative of which is the proliferation of grammatical rules, which is against the thesis of generative grammar.
John Thomas Grinder Jr. is an American linguist, writer, management consultant, trainer and speaker. Grinder is credited with co-creating the pseudoscience known as neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) with Richard Bandler. He is co-director of Quantum Leap Inc., a management consulting firm founded by his partner Carmen Bostic St. Clair in 1987. Grinder and Bostic St. Clair also run workshops and seminars on NLP internationally.
Deep structure and surface structure are concepts used in linguistics, specifically in the study of syntax in the Chomskyan tradition of transformational generative grammar.
Zellig Sabbettai Harris was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language. These developments from the first 10 years of his career were published within the first 25. His contributions in the subsequent 35 years of his career include transfer grammar, string analysis, elementary sentence-differences, algebraic structures in language, operator grammar, sublanguage grammar, a theory of linguistic information, and a principled account of the nature and origin of language.
Generative grammar, or generativism, is a theoretical approach in linguistics that regards grammar as a domain-specific system of rules that generates all and only the grammatical sentences of a given language. In light of poverty of the stimulus arguments, grammar is regarded as being partly innate, the innate portion of the system being referred to as universal grammar. The generative approach has focused on the study of syntax while addressing other aspects of language including semantics, morphology, phonology, and psycholinguistics.
In linguistics, the minimalist program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky.
Syntactic Structures is an important work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957. A short monograph of about a hundred pages, it is recognized as one of the most significant and influential linguistic studies of the 20th century. It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning, thus arguing for the independence of syntax from semantics.
Generative semantics was a research program in theoretical linguistics which held that syntactic structures are computed on the basis of meanings rather than the other way around. Generative semantics developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid-1960s, but stood in opposition to it. The period in which the two research programs coexisted was marked by intense and often personal clashes now known as the linguistics wars. Its proponents included Haj Ross, Paul Postal, James McCawley, and George Lakoff, who dubbed themselves "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse".
Richard Milton Martin was an American logician and analytic philosopher.
Ray C. Dougherty is an American linguist and was a member of the Arts and Science faculty at New York University until 2014 (retired). He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from Dartmouth College in the early 1960s and his Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. At MIT, Dougherty was one of the first students of Noam Chomsky, working in the field of transformational grammar. During the Linguistics Wars of the 1970s, Dougherty was a critic of the generative semantics movement. Specializing in computational linguistics, Dougherty has published several books and articles on the subject.
The linguistics wars were extended deputes among American theoretical linguists that occurred mostly during the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from a disagreement between Noam Chomsky and several of his associates and students. The debates started in 1967 when linguists Paul Postal, John R. Ross, George Lakoff, and James D. McCawley —self-dubbed the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"—proposed an alternative approach in which the relation between semantics and syntax is viewed differently, which treated deep structures as meaning rather than syntactic objects. While Chomsky and other generative grammarians argued that meaning is driven by an underlying syntax, generative semanticists posited that syntax is shaped by an underlying meaning. This intellectual divergence led to two competing frameworks in generative semantics and interpretive semantics.
Merge is one of the basic operations in the Minimalist Program, a leading approach to generative syntax, when two syntactic objects are combined to form a new syntactic unit. Merge also has the property of recursion in that it may be applied to its own output: the objects combined by Merge are either lexical items or sets that were themselves formed by Merge. This recursive property of Merge has been claimed to be a fundamental characteristic that distinguishes language from other cognitive faculties. As Noam Chomsky (1999) puts it, Merge is "an indispensable operation of a recursive system ... which takes two syntactic objects A and B and forms the new object G={A,B}" (p. 2).
This is a list of writings published by the American author Noam Chomsky.
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax is a book on linguistics written by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1965. In Aspects, Chomsky presented a deeper, more extensive reformulation of transformational generative grammar (TGG), a new kind of syntactic theory that he had introduced in the 1950s with the publication of his first book, Syntactic Structures. Aspects is widely considered to be the foundational document and a proper book-length articulation of Chomskyan theoretical framework of linguistics. It presented Chomsky's epistemological assumptions with a view to establishing linguistic theory-making as a formal discipline comparable to physical sciences, i.e. a domain of inquiry well-defined in its nature and scope. From a philosophical perspective, it directed mainstream linguistic research away from behaviorism, constructivism, empiricism and structuralism and towards mentalism, nativism, rationalism and generativism, respectively, taking as its main object of study the abstract, inner workings of the human mind related to language acquisition and production.
Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures (LGB) is a book by the linguist Noam Chomsky, published in 1981. It is based on the lectures Chomsky gave at the GLOW conference and workshop held at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, in 1979. In this book, Chomsky presented his government and binding theory of syntax. It had great influence on the syntactic research in early 1980s, especially among the linguists working within the transformational grammar framework.
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory is a 1964 book by American linguist Noam Chomsky. It is a revised and expanded version of "The Logical Basis of Linguistic Theory", a paper that Chomsky presented in the ninth International Congress of Linguists held in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1962. It is a short monograph of about a hundred pages, similar to Chomsky's earlier Syntactic Structures (1957). In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Chomsky presents many of its ideas in a more elaborate manner.
The basis of Noam Chomsky's linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited. He argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences. In adopting this position Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner, who viewed speech, thought, and all behavior as a completely learned product of the interactions between organisms and their environments. Accordingly, Chomsky argues that language is a unique evolutionary development of the human species and distinguished from modes of communication used by any other animal species. Chomsky's nativist, internalist view of language is consistent with the philosophical school of "rationalism" and contrasts with the anti-nativist, externalist view of language consistent with the philosophical school of "empiricism", which contends that all knowledge, including language, comes from external stimuli.
