Page 326 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes describes the language in its entirety. A grammar that achieves explanatory adequacy has the
additional property that it gives an insight into the underlying linguistic structures in the human
mind; that is, it does not merely describe the grammar of a language, but makes predictions about
how linguistic knowledge is mentally represented. For Chomsky, the nature of such mental
representations is largely innate, so if a grammatical theory has explanatory adequacy it must be
able to explain the various grammatical nuances of the languages of the world as relatively minor
variations in the universal pattern of human language. Chomsky argued that, even though linguists
were still a long way from constructing descriptively adequate grammars, progress in terms of
descriptive adequacy will only come if linguists hold explanatory adequacy as their goal. In other
words, real insight into the structure of individual languages can only be gained through
comparative study of a wide range of languages, on the assumption that they are all cut from the
same cloth.
"I-Language" and "E-Language"
In 1986, Chomsky proposed a distinction between I-Language and E-Language, similar but not
identical to the competence/performance distinction. (I-language) refers to Internal language and
is contrasted with External Language (or E-language). I-Language is taken to be the object of study
in linguistic theory; it is the mentally represented linguistic knowledge that a native speaker of a
language has, and is therefore a mental object - from this perspective, most of theoretical linguistics
is a branch of psychology. E-Language encompasses all other notions of what a language is, for
example that it is a body of knowledge or behavioural habits shared by a community. Thus,
E-Language is not itself a coherent concept, and Chomsky argues that such notions of language
are not useful in the study of innate linguistic knowledge, i.e., competence, even though they may
seem sensible and intuitive, and useful in other areas of study. Competence, he argues, can only
be studied if languages are treated as mental objects.
Grammaticality
Chomsky argued that the notions "grammatical" and "ungrammatical" could be defined in a
meaningful and useful way. In contrast, an extreme behaviorist linguist would argue that language
can only be studied through recordings or transcriptions of actual speech, the role of the linguist
being to look for patterns in such observed speech, but not to hypothesize about why such patterns
might occur, nor to label particular utterances as either "grammatical" or "ungrammatical." Although
few linguists in the 1950s actually took such an extreme position, Chomsky was at an opposite
extreme, defining grammaticality in an unusually mentalistic way (for the time).[9] He argued
that the intuition of a native speaker is enough to define the grammaticalness of a sentence; that
is, if a particular string of English words elicits a double take, or feeling of wrongness in a native
English speaker, and when various extraneous factors affecting intuitions are controlled for, it can
be said that the string of words is ungrammatical. This, according to Chomsky, is entirely distinct
from the question of whether a sentence is meaningful, or can be understood. It is possible for a
sentence to be both grammatical and meaningless, as in Chomsky's famous example "colorless
green ideas sleep furiously." But such sentences manifest a linguistic problem distinct from that
posed by meaningful but ungrammatical (non)-sentences such as "man the bit sandwich the," the
meaning of which is fairly clear, but no native speaker would accept as well formed.
The use of such intuitive judgments permitted generative syntacticians to base their research on a
methodology in which studying language through a corpus of observed speech became
downplayed, since the grammatical properties of constructed sentences were considered to be
appropriate data to build a grammatical model on.
Minimalism
From the mid-1990s onwards, much research in transformational grammar has been inspired by
Chomsky's Minimalist Program. The "Minimalist Program" aims at the further development of
ideas involving economy of derivation and economy of representation, which had started to
become significant in the early 1990s, but were still rather peripheral aspects of Transformational-
generative grammar theory.

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