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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 48
typically have a brief section on the phonology of the language concerned, a lot
of information on the inflectional morphology of the language concerned, and
some relatively brief sections with headings such as ‘Uses of the dative’ or
‘Sequence of tenses’ which considered the interface between morphology and
syntax.
For Chomsky, this is entirely back to front. A language is a set of sentences,
and what allows a speaker to produce and a hearer to understand these sentences
is the ability to manipulate syntactic structure. Chomsky focuses on
that part of grammar which most previous commentators had simply presupposed
or ignored: the ability to produce and understand sentences such as
(1) (Chomsky 1965: ch. 2), to understand the ambiguity of sentences like
(2) (Chomsky 1957: 88), to understand sentences like (3) even though some
information is missing from them (Chomsky 1957: 66), and to preceive the
relatedness of pairs of sentences like those in (4).
(1) Sincerity may frighten the boy.
(2) The shooting of the hunters frightened the boy.
(3) John has arrived and so have I.
(4) The girl has eaten the peach.
The peach has been eaten by the girl.
For Chomsky, phonology and semantics are dependent on syntax, and these
other components of the grammar take the output of the syntactic component
and turn it into a spoken utterance or a semantic representation. In early work,
morphology is dealt with as part of the syntax, in later work it is dealt with as part
of the lexicon, but in neither case is it central to the workings of the grammar.
In many ways this is Chomsky’s most successful innovation, and is now
taken as axiomatic by many linguists.
Idealisation of data
Chomsky points out that researchers in the hard sciences such as chemistry and
physics standardly discount factors which might confound their experimental
results: the effect of air resistance on the effect of gravity on falling bodies, for
example. The kinds of factors that Chomsky wants to exclude in the study of
language are those that divert attention from the underlying generalisations,
just as would be the case in chemistry or physics. These factors are not well
defined, but in principle the idea of idealisation of data seems uncontroversial,
and has probably always been part of the business of a linguist or grammarian,
who would otherwise be faced with too much variability to be able to produce
a coherent description. What is different about Chomsky, in this regard, is that
he is quite open about his procedure.