Читать книгу The Historiography of Generative Linguistics - András Kertész - Страница 10

The systematization of the approaches surveyed in this chapter is based on the following three criteria:

First of all, we will restrict the term ›generative linguistics‹ to ChomskyChomsky, Noam’s work and use it in the sense of ›Chomsky’s generative linguistics‹.1 The sections discuss diverse solutions to (P) with respect to Chomsky’s publications that have been regarded as milestones and are substantially referred to in the historiographicalhistoriography literature: Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures (2.1), AspectsAspects of the Theory of Syntax (2.2.), The Sound Pattern of English (2.3), Lectures on Government and Binding (2.4) and finally, the Minimalist ProgramMinimalist Program (2.5). Each section devoted to the diverse historiographical approaches to these works will start with an introductory subsection which sketches basic features of Chomsky’s work at issue. These sketches serve as background information for those readers who are less familiar with generative linguistics and thus they prepare the understanding of the historiographical approaches, which presuppose this knowledge; nevertheless, they are not intended as a comprehensive introduction to the theorytheory and practice of generative linguistics. By doing this, we will try to present these pieces of information in as value-free a manner as possible2 – in order to do so, the very concise summaries of basic tenets will be illustrated by numerous quotations from Chomsky’s works at issue, so that we let him speak, rather than present the interpretations of the present author. Later, we will see how the historiographical literature, in many different ways, enriches them by its evaluations, its intellectual and socialsocial preferences, and its legitimizing attitudes.

Figure 1

Second, it is KuhnKuhn, Thomas S.’s term ›scientificscientific revolutionrevolutionscientific‹ that provides the point of departure for the systematization. Figure 1 shows the main categories of the systematization with respect to this term. The categories, however, are to be understood in a more refined manner than the figure shows, because in the literature not all main categories are represented with respect to all Chomskyan publications mentioned in the previous paragraph. Moreover, the analysis of the literature will show that in the particular historiographicalhistoriography approaches the main categories should be subdivided into subcategories in different ways. Finally, the terminology is vague in many of the historiographical approaches (see also Section 3.1.3.4 on this).

The third criterion is that in the various sections we will discuss the different solutions to (P) by reconstructing their basic terms, their central hypotheses and the historiographicalhistoriography frameworks they apply.

The order in which we present the set of approaches that discuss the role of ChomskyChomsky, Noam’s different works in the context of the historyhistory of linguistics will be systematic, rather than chronological. The sections presenting the different solutions to (P) vary in length and detail, because the approaches are highly heterogeneous in terms of their genre, historiographicalhistoriography foundation, scope, and significance. We will provide a more extensive discussion of those approaches that present a sophisticated and refined description of the applied historiographical framework, or that have been widely debated.