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Persistent Topics in Linguistic Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Noam Chomsky
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Contemporary study of language has turned to questions of linguistic structure and cognitive psychology of a sort that aroused little interest in the immediately preceding period. The extent to which this is a return to long neglected topics rather than an innovation is not widely appreciated, however, and I would like to comment briefly on this matter here.

A central topic of much current research is what we may call the “creative” aspect of language use, that is, its unboundedness and freedom from stimulus control. The speaker-hearer whose normal use of language is “creative,” in this sense, must have internalized a system of rules that determines the semantic interpretations of an unbounded set of sentences; he must, in other words, be in control of what is now often called a generative grammar of his language. A generative grammar must determine the structural description of each possible sentence, where the structural description of a sentence is a formal object of some sort that contains what information the rules of the language provide concerning the semantic content and phonetic form of this sentence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 13 , Issue 51 , September 1965 , pp. 13 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © 1965 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 For further information, see the chapters by G. A. Miller and N. Chomsky in R. D. Luce, R. Bush, E. Galanter (eds.), Handbook of Mathematical Psychology, Vol. II, Wiley (1963), particularly, chapter 11 and chapter 13, part II; J. Katz and P. Postal, An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Description. M.I.T. Press (1964); N. Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Mouton (1964) and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. M.I.T. Press (1965).

2 This account is excerpted from a longer study entitled Cartesian linguistics, to be published by Harper and Row.

3 Discourse on Method, part V, and later, in his correspondence. See Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics, for several quotations and references.

4 Discours physique de la parole (1668).

5 Such procedures are sometimes referred to as "analysis by synthesis' procedures.