Aspects of the theory of syntax by noam chomsky download

It is not, of course, necessary to assume that empiricist and rationalist views can always be sharply distinguished and that these currents cannot cross.

Particular empiricist and rationalist views can be made qui te precise and can then be presented as explicit hypotheses about acquisition of knowledge, in particular, about the innate structure of a language-acquisition device. Taxonomic linguistics is empiricist in its assumption that general linguistic theory consists only of a body of procedures for determining the grammar of a language from a corpus of data, the form of language being unspecified except insofar as restrictions on possible grammars are determined by this set of procedures.

A general linguistic theory of the sort roughly described earlier, and elaborated in more detail in the following chapters and in other studies of transformational grammar, must therefore be regarded as a specific hypothesis, of an essentially rationalist cast, as to the nature of mental structures and processes.

See Chomsky 1 b, 1 b, 1 and Katz forthcoming for some further discussion of this point. When such constrasting views are clearly formulated, we may ask, as an empirical question, which if either is correct.

There is no a priori way to settle this issue. Where empiricist and rationalist views have been presented with sufficient care so that the question of correctness can be seriously raised, it cannot, for example, be maintained that in any clear sense one is "simpler" than the other in terms of its potential physical realization,3 1 and even if this could be shown, one way or the other, it would have no bearing on what is completely a factual issue.

This factual question can be approached in several ways. In particular, restricting ourselves now to the question of language acquisition, we must bear in mind that any concrete empi ri cis t proposal does impose certain conditions on the form of the grammars that can result from application of its inductive principles to primary data.

The same question can be asked about a concrete rationalist proposal. This has. In fact, the second question has rarely been raised in any serious way in connection with empiricist views but cf.

Miller, Galanter, and Pribram, 1 , pp. The only proposals that are explicit enough to support serious study are those that have been developed within taxonomic linguistics. It seems to have been demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that, quite apart from any question of feasibility, methods of the sort that have been studied in taxonomic linguistics are intrinsically incapable of yielding the systems of grammatical knowledge that must be attributed to the speaker of a language cf. In general, then, it seems to me correct to say that empiricist theories about language acquisition are refutable wherever they are clear, and that further empiricist speculations have been quite empty and uninformative.

One might seek other ways of testing particular hypotheses about a language-acquisition device. A theory that attributes possession of certain linguistic universals to a language-acquisition system, as a property to be realized under appropriate external conditions, implies that only certain kinds of symbolic systems can be acquired and used as languages by this device.

Others should be beyond its language-acquisition capacity. As a concrete example, consider the fact that, according to the theory of transformational grammar, only certain kinds of formal operations on strings can appear in grammars - operations that, furthermore, have no a priori justification. For example, the permitted operations cannot be shown in any sense to be the most "simple" or "elementary" ones that might be invented. In fact, what might in general be considered "elementary operations" on strings do not qualify as grammatical transformations at all, while many of the operations that do qualify are far from elementary, in any general sense.

Thus it is possible to formulate a transformation that can insert all or part of the Auxiliary Verb to the left of a Noun Phrase that precedes it, independently of what the length or internal complexity of the strings belonging to these categories may be. Many other such predictions, none of them at all obvious in any a priori sense, can be deduced from any sufficiently explicit theory of linguistic universals that is attributed to a language-acquisition device as an intrinsic property.

Notice that when we maintain that a system is not learnable by a language-acquisition device that mirrors human capacities, we do not imply that this system cannot be mastered by a human in some other way, if treated as a puzzle or intellectual exercise of some sort. The language-acquisition device is only one component of the total system of intellectual structures that can be applied to problem solving and concept formation; in other words, the faculte de langage is only one of the faculties of the mind.

What one would expect, however, is that there should be a qualitative difference in the way in which an organism with a functional language-acquisition system82 will approach and deal with systems that are languagelike and others that are not. However, the field has not developed in this way.

Learning theory has, for the most part, concentrated on what seems a much more marginal topic, namely the question of species-independent regularities in acquisition of items of a "behavioral repertoire" under experimentally manipulable conditions.

Consequently, it has necessarily directed its attention to tasks that are extrinsic to an organism's cognitive capacities - tasks that must be approached in a devious, indirect, and piecemeal fashion. In the course of this work, some incidental information has been obtained about the effect of intrinsic cognitive structure and intrinsic organization of behavior on what is learned, but this has rarely been the focus of serious attention outside of ethology.

The sporadic exceptions to this observation see, for example, the discussion of "instinctual drift" in Breland and Breland, 1 96 1 are quite suggestive, as are many ethological studies of lower organisms. The general question and its many ramifications, however, remain in a primitive state. In brief, it seems clear that the present situation with regard to the study of language learning is essentially as follows.

We have a certain amount of evidence about the character of the generative grammars that must be the "output" of an acquisition model for language.

Further empiricist speculations contribute nothing that even faintly suggests a way of overcoming the intrinsic limitations of the methods that have so far been proposed and elaborated. A consideration of the character of the grammar that is of the available data, the striking uniformity of the resulting acquired, the degenerate quality and narrowly limited extent grammars. It is.

Consequently, the empiricist effort to show how the assumptions. The real problem is that of developing a hypothesis about initial structure that is sufficiently rich to account for acquisition of language, yet not so rich as to be inconsistent with the known diversity of language. It is a matter of no concern and of only historical interest that such a hypothesis will evidently not satisfy the preconceptions about learning that derive from centuries of empiricist doctrine. These preconceptions are not only quite implausible.

Such a position is particularly implausible with regard to language, an aspect of the child's world that is a human creation and would naturally be expected to reflect intrinsic human capacity in its internal organization.

In short, the structure of particular languages may very well be largely determined by factors over which the individual has no conscious control and concerning which society may have little choice or freedom.

On the basis of the best information now available, it seems reasonable to suppose that a child cannot help constructing a particular sort of transformational grammar to account for the data presented to him, any more than he can control his perception of solid objects or his attention to line and angle.

It seems to me that the problem of clarifying this issue and sharpening our understanding of its many facets provides the most interesting and important reason for the study of descriptively adequate grammars and, beyond this, the formulation and justification of a general linguistic theory that meets the condition of explanatory adequacy. To accept traditional mentalism, in this way, is not to accept Bloomfield's dichotomy of "mentalism" versus "mechanism.

The mentalist, in this traditional sense, need make no assumptions about the possible physiological basis for the mental reality that he studies. In particular, he need not deny that there is such a basis. One would guess, rather, that it is the mentalistic studies that will ultimately be of greatest value for the investigation of neurophysiological mechanisms, since they alone are concerned with determining abstractly the properties that such mechanisms must exhibit and the functions they must perform.

In fact, the issue of mentalism versus antimentalism in linguistics apparently has to do only with goals and interests, and not with questions of truth or falsity, sense or nonsense. At least three issues are involved in this rather idle controversy: a dualism - are the rules that underlie performance represented in a nonmaterial medium?

It is the dualistic position against which Bloomfield irrelevantly inveighed. The behaviorist position is not an arguable matter. It is simply an expression of lack of interest in theory and explanation. This is clear, for example, in TwaddeIJ's critique 1 of Sapir's mentalistic phonology, which used informant responses and comments as evidence bearing on the psychological reality of some abstract system of phonological elements. Perhaps this loss of interest in theory, in the usual sense, was fostered by certain ideas e.

In any event, question b poses no substantive issue. To maintain, on grounds of methodological purity, that introspective judgments of the informant often, the linguist himself should be disregarded is, for the present, to condemn the study of language to utter sterility. It is difficult to imagine what possible reason might be given for this.

We return to this matter later. For further discussion, see Katz 1 C. This has been denied recently by several European linguists e. They offer no reasons for their skepticism concerning traditional grammar, however. Uhlenbeck , and the discussion there. Furthermore, it seems to me that speech perception is also best studied in this framework. See, for example, Halle and Stevens 1 Tests that seem to determine a useful notion of this sort have been described in various places - for example, Miller and Isard The notion "likely to be produced" or "probable" is sometimes thought to be more "objective" and antecedently better defined than the others, on the assumption that there is some clear meaning to the notion "probability of a sentence" or "probability of a sentence type.

But in this case, though "probability of a sentence type " is clear and well defined, it is an utterly useless notion, since almost all highly acceptable sentences in the intuitive sense will have probabilities empirically indistinguishable from zero and will belong to sentence types with probabilities empirically indistinguishable from zero.

Thus the acceptable or grammatical sentences or sentence types are no more likely, in any objective sense of this word, than the others. This remains true if we consider, not "likelihood," but "likelihood relative to a given situation," as long as "situations" are specified in terms of observable physical properties and are not mentalistic constructs.

For further discussion, see Katz and Fodor 1 That it may be true is suggested by several for the moment, quite untested observations. For example, in Chomsky and Miller 1 , p.

The matter is worth studying, since a positive result concerning 4ii would, as noted, support a conclusion about organization of memory which is not entirely obvious. These conclusions seem to me equally unacceptable. Thus to assume with Harman that the phrase "a tall, young, handsome, intelligent man" has the structure [[[[tall young] handsome intelligent man] seems to me no more justifiable than to assume that it has the structure [tall [young [handsome [intelligent man ]].

Notice that there are cases where further structure might be justified e. Here, too, neither the structure [[young, old] and middle-aged nor [young [old and middle-aged has any justification. In these cases all known syntactic. Notice also that this is the weakest assumption. There are various ways of justifying assignment of constituent structure. For example. All of these claims are patently false in this case, and the other cases mentioned here.

It seems difficult, then, to see any grounds for objecting to the traditional analysis and insisting on additional intermediate categorization, in such cases as these. Yngve 1 , and several other papers has proposed a different theory to account for certain observations such as those of 4. Furthermore, the hypothesis is contradicted by the observation 4iii that multiply coordinated structures cf. It also fails to explain why examples of type 4iv , such as 2i , though very low in "depth," are still unacceptable.

However, Yngve makes one important point in these papers, namely, that some transformations can be used to decrease nesting, hence to reduce the perceptual load. This suggests an interesting argumen t as to why grammars should contain transformational rules.

I t is astonishing to find that even this truism has recently been challenged. See Dixon 1 However, it seems that when Dixon denies that a language has infinitely many sentences, he is using the term "infinite" in some special and rather obscure sense. Thus on the same page p. Aside from terminology, I follow here the exposition in Katz and Postal 1 In particular, I shall assume throughout that the semantic component is essentially as they describe it and that the phonological component is essentially as described in Chomsk.

I assume throughout that the syntactic component contains a lexicon, and that each lexical item is specified in the lexicon in terms of its intrinsic semantic features, whatever these may b e. I shall return to this matter in the next chapter.

The terms "depth grammar" and "surface grammar" are famil iar in modern philosophy in something roughly like the sense here intended cf. Wittgenstein's distinction of " Tiefengrammatik" and "O berflachengrammatik," 1 , p.

The distinction between deep and surface structure, in the sense in which these terms are used here, is drawn quite clearly in the Port-Royal Grammar Lancelot et al.

See Chomsky , pp. Thus, we speak of feeling pain as if pain was something distinct from the feeling of it. We speak of pain coming and going, and removing from one place to another. Such phrases are meant by those who use them in a sense that is nei ther obscure nor false. But the philosopher puts them into his alembic. More generally, he criticizes the theory of ideas as based on a deviation from the "popular meaning, " in which " to have an idea of anything signifies nothing more than to think of it" p.

The wealth of research undertaken over the last two centuries is presented here in a systematic way, taking as its starting point the relationship of syntax with psychology throughout this period. The critical ideas expressed in the text are based on a detailed illustration of the different syntactic models and analyses rather than on the polemics between the different schools.

Although the past decades have seen a great diversity of approaches to the history of generative linguistics, there has been no systematic analysis of the state of the art. The aim of the book is to fill this gap.

Part I provides an unbiased, balanced and impartial overview of numerous approaches to the history of generative linguistics.

In addition, it evaluates the approaches thus discussed against a set of evaluation criteria. Part II demonstrates in a case study the workability of a model of plausible argumentation that goes beyond the limits of current historiographical approaches.

Due to the comprehensive analysis of the state of the art, the book may be useful for graduate and undergraduate students. Search Search. Search Advanced Search close Close. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax By Noam Chomsky Chomsky proposes a reformulation of the theory of transformational generative grammar that takes recent developments in the descriptive analysis of particular languages into account.

Add to Cart Buying Options. Request Permissions Exam copy. Overview Author s Praise.