Chapter 2 - The Chomskyan Revolution

Abstract

This chapter presents the overview of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, which introduced the theory of transformational generative grammar. What made Syntactic Structures revolutionary was its conception of a grammar as a theory of a language, subject to the same constraints on construction and evaluation as any theory in the natural sciences. Prior to 1957, it was widely thought, not just in linguistics but throughout the humanities and social sciences, that a formal yet nonempiricist theory of a human attribute was impossible. Chomsky showed that such a theory was possible. Indeed, he devotes the central chapter of Syntactic Structures to demonstrating the parallels between linguistic theory, as he conceived it, and what uncontroversially would be taken to be scientific theories. Still, Syntactic Structures would not have made a revolution simply by presenting a novel theory of the nature of grammar. The book had revolutionary consequences because it was not merely an exercise in speculative philosophy of science. On the contrary, Syntactic Structures demonstrates the practical possibility of a nonempiricist theory of linguistic structure: half of the volume is devoted to the presentation and defense of a formal fragment of English grammar. Chomsky had two major goals in Syntactic Structures. First, he had the general goal of motivating linguistic theory and its formalization by means of generative grammars that were subject to certain conditions of adequacy. Also, he had the more narrow goal of demonstrating that only a specific type of generative grammar had the ability to meet these conditions, namely, a generative grammar embodying transformational and phrase structure rules.