Читать книгу The Historiography of Generative Linguistics - András Kertész - Страница 11

Basically, it is ChomskyChomsky, Noam’s (1957) Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures that is considered to be the first seminal contribution to generative linguistics (but see footnote 1), although its text is rooted in his manuscript of 1955 entitled The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory as well as in talks and papers.1 The main features of this work, which will be referred to in the next sections are as follows:

 While BloomfieldianBloomfieldian and neo-Bloomfieldianneo-Bloomfieldian linguistics focused on phonologyphonology (in their terminology: phonemicsphonemics) and morphologymorphology, ChomskyChomsky, Noam’s approach centers on syntax.2

 While for BloomfieldianBloomfieldian and neo-Bloomfieldianneo-Bloomfieldian linguists the main task was to reveal morphememorpheme classes based on distributionaldistributional properties, according to Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures the goal of syntactic research is to construct a grammargrammar of a given languagelanguage that is capable of producing all the grammatically well-formed sentences, and only the grammatically well-formed ones.3

 ChomskyChomsky, Noam introduces the distinction between ›grammaticalgrammatical‹ and ›ungrammaticalungrammatical‹ sentences.4

 The grammargrammar is capable of generating an infiniteinfinite number of sentences from a finitefinite set of elements.5

 In accordance with the Popperian trend of the analytical philosophy of sciencephilosophy of science, basically, grammars are to be conceived of as deductivedeductive theories characteristic of the natural sciencesciencenaturals, primarily physicsphysics.6

 As opposed to BloomfieldianBloomfieldian and neo-Bloomfieldianneo-Bloomfieldian linguistics, Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures assumes that there is no inductiveinductive procedure that facilitates the discovery of the correct grammargrammar. Instead, an evaluation procedureevaluation procedure is needed, the application of which may lead to the selection of the best grammar from possible candidates irrespective of how they were arrived at.7 From two alternative grammars the simpler one should be chosen.

 The grammargrammar consists of three levels: phrase structurephrase structure, transformationstransformation and morphosyntax.8

 The grammargrammar rests on a mathematicalmathematical foundation consisting of an algorithmicalgorithm formalism.9

 Syntax is autonomous insofar as its rules are not determined by semantics.10

As we will demonstrate in the next sections, these features of Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures have been interpreted and evaluated very differently by particular historiographicalhistoriography approaches.11