Читать книгу A Companion to Chomsky - Группа авторов - Страница 48

The foundation for contemporary generative syntactic research is a broad class of generalizations about natural language syntax that were (primarily) discovered between the late 1950s and the early 1980s and that (primarily) concern nonlocal syntactic dependencies and the hierarchical structure on which they are instantiated. These generalizations are “enduring” because they are cross‐linguistically robust, they can be organized into typologies that encourage reductivist analysis, and they serve as useful diagnostic tools. The fact that generative syntax has uncovered such a large number of generalizations in such a short span of time (relative to the progress made in the centuries that preceded its inception) is directly attributable to its conceptual and methodological foundations, which were established by Noam Chomsky in his earliest work on language.