Chomsky et la linguistique fonctionnelle française : Relecture de Georges Mounin sur l’histoire de la linguistique au XXe siècle

Abstract

This paper deals with one aspect of the complex relationship between Chomsky and French linguistics (specifically the French school of functional linguistics of André Martinet). The starting point is a well-known book published by Mounin on the history of linguistics in the twentieth century (La linguistique du XXe siècle, 1912), a book which still figures prominently in standard references on the evolution of the field. Retrospectively, when one examines Chomsky’s scientific production since the fifties, the condemnation of Chomsky’s work as thin on the ground or simply fashionable looks somewhat odd. Worse than that, a demonstration is offered that this book gave an inaccurate and distorted picture of Chomsky and his work at the time. Whenever facts can be checked, Mounin, a staunch disciple of André Martinet, can be shown to be misleading or plainly wrong. Sadly, an examination of the 1993 autobiography of André Martinet demonstrates that this anti-Chomskyan bias is hardly a new phenomenon and has continued throughout the twentieth century. To counterbalance the distorted views that I criticise, a reasonably comprehensive bibliography of Chomsky’s work is included in the paper as well as a synoptic view of Chomsky’s scientific career. 1 also take advantage of this paper to illustrate one of the insights of generative grammar (i.e. the need to formalise the open-endedness of language) with respect to English nominal compounds.