The Chomskyan revolution: generative grammar

It is no exaggeration to say that the publication in 1957 of a short volume entitled Syntactic Structures, by a then little-known scholar called Noam Chomsky, marked the start of a revolution which transformed modern linguistics. The approach, now known as generative grammar, set a new agenda for the discipline and remains the dominant paradigm in linguistics today. We will consider the intellectual background to Chomsky’s work and notably his rejection of behaviorism, his views on innateness and the generative approach which he launched, before examining some of the challenges he has faced from critics.

Whatever one’s ultimate view of Chomsky’s ideas and the agenda he has set for linguistics, his importance as a thinker cannot be denied. We begin with his critique of the Descriptivists, and his rejection of the prevailing orthodoxies of the first half of the twentieth century.

Linguistics was originally a form of torture practised upon prisoners languishing in a dungeon (indeed, the word linguistics derives from the verb languish); the method of torture was to continuously recite Oscar Wilde quotations at the prisoner for hours on end. More recently, Noam Chomsky has modified the torture into a science. This science would disclose which exactly one of the quotations attributed to Oscar Wilde on Uncyclopedia is fake. This unsolved problem is the holy grail of modern linguistics, and those who pursue it are called linguists.

That Noam Chomsky’s name appears in the spoof online encyclopedia entry above for ‘Linguistics’ shows how closely this often-controversial figure has become associated with the discipline.