Читать книгу The Historiography of Generative Linguistics - András Kertész - Страница 20

SeurenSeuren, Pieter A.M. (1998) overviews the historyhistory of Western linguistics from the point of view of the philosophy of sciencephilosophy of science. According to Seuren (1998: 250, 252), the main achievement of ChomskyChomsky, Noam’s work is the following:

(T9)	(a)	Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures is original insofar as it systematized and critically evaluated the theses, terms and methods of neo-Bloomfieldian structuralismstructuralism.
	(b)	In comparison to neo-Bloomfieldianism, the novelty of Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures is of a metatheoretical,metatheoretical rather than of a linguistic nature.

SeurenSeuren, Pieter A.M. does not consider ChomskyChomsky, Noam’s achievements revolutionaryrevolutionary. He argues that generative linguistics is basically rooted in the work of Zellig S. HarrisHarris, Zellig S., while Chomsky synthesized and improved his findings. They were thinking along the same lines and continuitycontinuity can be observed between their works. Seuren believes that besides Chomsky’s synthesizing work, his greatest achievement is that by raising and answering pivotal metatheoreticalmetatheoretical questions, he applied the terms and principles of the philosophy of sciencephilosophy of science to linguistics. Thus his greatest achievement is to have placed linguistics in the context of the philosophy of science. In Seuren’s view, »most of Chomsky’s work in theoretical linguistics deals with metatheoretical questions, which makes Chomsky a metalinguistmetalinguist rather than a linguist« (Seuren 1998: 252; emphasis added). He called attention to issues which had fallen outside the scope of neo-Bloomfieldianneo-Bloomfieldianism: the nature of linguistic datadata, realism vs. nominalism, the criteria of adequacy, formalization, explanation, causality etc. (Seuren 1998: 252ff.).

According to SeurenSeuren, Pieter A.M., in the course of his metatheoretically oriented activity, ChomskyChomsky, Noam suggested a host of general principles and constraints. However, the analysis of the datadata was carried out by others, who regularly found that Chomsky’s suggestions did not work (Seuren 1998: 252, footnote 27).

SeurenSeuren, Pieter A.M.’s (1998) approach focuses on the close interplay between aspects of the historiographyhistoriography of linguistics and those of the philosophy of sciencephilosophy of science. Nevertheless, he does not specify the details of the metascientificmetascientific background assumptions he takes for granted as his point of departure.1 Seuren’s (1998) solution to the problem (P) can be reconstructed as follows:

(SP9)

The basic term of the historiographyhistoriography of generative linguistics with respect to Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures is ›metatheory‹metatheory, its central thesis is (T9) and its framework is the association of historiography with the perspective of the philosophy of science.philosophy of science