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Unit 3: Brief History of the Growth of Modern Linguistics: Bloomfield to Chomsky

behaviourist scientist of language. The Yale School of American linguistics (Bernard Bloch, Robert Notes
A. Hall, Jr. Z.S. Harris and others) is influenced by Bloomfield. His Language (1933), which was a
revision of an earlier work, Introduction to the Study of Language (1914), has been termed “the Bible
of American Linguistics.”
3.6.5 Noam Chomsky
A mathematician, psychologist, sociologist, philosopher, linguist, Noam Chomsky is the most
dynamic, influential and revolutionary linguist of today. He is the Panini of modern era. Like
Panini he too has provided a new shape and new brevity in the description of linguistic phenomena,
has brought a revolution, and like Panini he too has brought linguistics and philosophy together.
He is a linguist amongst mathematicians and a philosopher among the linguists. His ‘most original,
and probably his most enduring contribution to linguistics is the mathematical rigour and precision
with which he formalized the properties of alternative system of grammatical description (Lyons,
Chomsky,). He has become one of the greatest masters of human thought in our age. He is now not
an individual merely but a whole school of linguistics. His transformational-generative grammar
has transformed the whole concept of grammar, and generated new currents of thoughtful water—
hot and cold. He has suggested means of correcting weaknesses of both the traditional and
descriptive grammars.
Chomsky’s notion of the grammar of a language is a refreshing departure from the tradition. His
proposal is “attractive, reasonable and clearly stated.” He rejects and replaces many of the
assumptions that were so popular in structuralism.
His contribution is two fold: (1) he has questioned the accepted goals towards which linguistic
theory was oriented, and redefined the aims and functions of a grammar; (2) he has specified the
forms this new type of grammar should take. In the 1950’s linguistics was in the doldrums,
particularly in America. The whole linguistic movement has become a narrow and introverted.
There had been no major change of direction in linguistics for more than twenty years. When
Chomsky arrived on the scene, linguistics was ready for a revolution.
Between 1933 and 1957, linguistics had set itself to the task of perfecting “discovery procedures”:
that is, finding out a set of principles which would enable a linguist to ‘discover’ or extract a
grammar from a mass of data collected from an informant. Grammar had come to mean an
inventory or catalogue of linguistic data. At that time grammar was a perfect, objective description
of a language, and the ultimate goal of linguistics was to find rules which led to such grammars.
But Chomsky rejected such notions:
A grammar of particular language is, in effect, an hypothesis about the principles of sentence
formation in this language. It represents a factual claim concerning the rules that underline the
data that have been collected. We judge the truth or falsity of this hypothesis by considering how
well the grammar succeeds in organizing the data, how satisfying an explanation it provides for
a wealth of empirical observations, how far-reaching are its generalizations, how successfully it
accomodates new data.
And therefore a theory of linguistic structure is an hypothesis about linguistic universals. It asserts
that the grammars of all human languages are constructed on such-and-such a specified plan.
Such a theory should explicitly characterize the form of grammars (the scheme for grammatical
description) and should provide a method for selecting among alternative grammars.
His generative grammar thus is ‘not a large collection of neatly organized examples, supplemented
with comments about these examples and hints as to how to construct similar ones. Nor is it a
discussion of efficient and compact notations (e.g. inventories of phonemes, morphemes), categories
or construction types ... A generative grammar is a system of explicit rules that assign to each
sequence of phones ... a structural description that contains all information about how this sequence

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