Page 348 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes There are scholars who by ‘formal’ mean ‘the structural or modern anthropological linguistics’ which
does not attempt to deal with deep structure and its relations to surface structure. Rather, its attention
is limited to surface structure—to the phonetic form of an utterance and its organisation into units of
varying size (Chomsky). It is much more concerned with the form than with the spirit or content. In
the words of Chomsky, “Structural linguistics has very real accomplishments to its credit. To me, it
seems that its major achievement is to have provided a factual and a methodological basis that makes
it possible to return to the problems that occupied the traditional universal grammarians with some
hope of extending and deepening their theory of language structure and language use. Modern
descriptive linguistics has enormously enriched the range of factual material available, and has
provided entirely new standards of clarity and objectivity.” (Chomsky, op. cit.)
One function of grammar is to specify as simply as possible for a language what sentences are
‘acceptable’, and to do this in terms of some general theory of language structure. The scholars of the
formal grammar have formulated ‘distribution’ and ‘discovery procedures’. In particular, it was
assumed that the proper task of ‘structural linguistics’ was to formulate a technique, or procedure,
which could be applied to a corpus of attested utternance and, with the minimum use of the informant’s
judgements of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ could be guaranteed to derive the rules of the grammar
from the corpus itself.
A grammatical description which is based entirely on the observable forms of a language may be
called FORMAL GRAMMAR, whereas a description based on meanings rather than forms is called
NOTIONAL or PHILOSOPHICAL GRAMMAR. A formal definition of noun in English might be: ‘a
word which distinguishes between singular and plural and possibly has a possessive form’, whereas
a notional definition might be: a ‘naming word’. Traditional grammar has always been a fusion of
notional and formal elements, which has often led to inconsistencies and discerpancies.
Two major traditions have been distinguished in modern linguistic theory by Chomsky: one is the
tradition of ‘universal’ or ‘philosophical’ or ‘notional’ grammar which flourished in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries; the second is the tradition of structural or descriptive linguistics, which
developed in the later 19th century and early twentieth century and reached its culminating point in
the 1950s. Universal grammar was concerned with general features of language structure rather than
with particular idiosyncracies. Universal grammarians believed: ‘Grammar should not be merely a
record of the data of usage, but rather should offer an explanation for such data. It should establish
general principles applicable to all languages, based ultimately on intrinsic properties of the mind,
which would explain how language is used and why it has the particular properties to which the
descriptive grammarian chooses, irrationally, to restrict his attention’ (Noam Chomsky, Selected Readings).
Chomsky further says that besides this, universal grammarians proceeded to develop a ‘rich and far-
reading’ account of the general principles of’language structure’, and a psychological theory dealing
with certain aspects of language use, with production and comprehension of sentences. Universal
grammar made a sharp distinction between what is called now ‘deep structure’ and ‘surface structure’.
‘What is more, universal grammar developed as part of a general philosophical tradition that provided
deep and important insights, also largely forgotten, into the use and acquisition of language, and,
further-more, into problems of preception, and acquisition, of knowledge in general’ (Selected Readings,).
The universal grammarians were interested in the universal properties of languages and not in their
individual idiosyncracies or individual properties. They believed all languages were alike. They were
vague and gave airy pronouncements not supported by any rigorous formalism. In theory grammar
should not be merely a record of data but should rather offer explanation (in the inter-relatedness of
sentences). They were interested in the organising power but they did it in the form of impression.
They did not create any formalism; they did not have motivated rules, leading from one to the other.
Yet they had a vision, not the framework to organise it.
Anthroplogical or structural linguists, on the other hand, were interested in studying languages as a
mirror of culture. No cultures are alike; hence no language are alike. ‘Structural linguistics is a direct
outgrowth of the concepts that emerged in Indo-European comparative study, which was primarily
concerned with language as a system of phonological units that undergo systematic modification in
phonetically determined contexts. Structural linguistics reinterpreted this concept for a fixed state of
a language, inverstigated the relations among such units and the patterns they form, and attempted,

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