Читать книгу The Historiography of Generative Linguistics - András Kertész - Страница 19

On the first pages of his book about American structuralismstructuralism, Peter MatthewsMatthews, Peter H., with heavy irony, criticizes the unreflected, mechanical applications of KuhnianKuhnian terms in oversimplifying didactic chronicles of the historyhistory of linguistics. He believes that »[…] the Worst Thing that has happened to the historiographyhistoriography of twentieth century linguistics« is the publication of Thomas S. KuhnKuhn, Thomas S.’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions because »it led so many of ChomskyChomsky, Noam’s supporters to make events fit Kuhn’s model« (Matthews 1993: 28). As a result of this, the application of Kuhn’s historiographical model to generative linguistics »partly obscured its real origins« (ibid).

MatthewsMatthews, Peter H. does not divide neo-Bloomfieldianneo-Bloomfieldianism into trends as HymesHymes, Dell and FoughtFought, John do. He scrutinizes Bloomfield’s texts and those of the neo-Bloomfieldians, and compares them to Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures and other texts that ChomskyChomsky, Noam published before or right after it. He does not go into details about the Theory of Government and BindingGovernment and Binding, Theory of, and the Minimalist ProgramMinimalist Program was established only after the publication of Matthews’ book. His main thesis is the following:

(T8)	Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures is the direct continuation and the improvement of the distributionalismdistributional of BloomfieldianBloomfieldian and neo-Bloomfieldianneo-Bloomfieldian linguistics.

MatthewsMatthews, Peter H. does not make his methodologymethodology explicit. Nevertheless, it is clear for the readers of his book that, in accordance with this thesis, he focuses on the role of distribution both in neo-Bloomfieldianneo-BloomfieldianBloomfieldian approaches and in Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures. In his opinion, ChomskyChomsky, Noam

[…] did not abandon the essential goal of distributionalismdistributional, or […] the empiricism that pervaded it. […] In abandoning the requirement that linguistic theorytheory should provide what he called a ›discovery procedurediscovery procedure‹ he liberated distributionalism from a constraint that was inessential. But what replaced it was the requirement that alternative sets of distributional rules should be evaluated by a measure of simplicitysimplicity. This was an attempt to rescue the programme, not to destroy it (MatthewsMatthews, Peter H. 1993: 141; emphasis added).1

MatthewsMatthews, Peter H.’ (1993), (2001) method centers on philology and the historyhistory of ideas. Based on a careful, many-sided and differentiated philological analysis and comparison of texts written in different periods by different authors, it outlines the history of the ideas shaping American structuralismstructuralism. Thus:

(SP8)

The basic term of the historiographyhistoriography of generative linguistics with respect to Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures is ›distribution‹, its central hypothesis is (T8) and its framework is the careful philological comparison of a wide range of written sources.