A History of English Language

A history of the english language 380
from there to morphology and syntax. It generally ignored semantics, or the study of
meaning. 71
In 1957 Noam Chomsky presented a radically different model of language in a thin,
technical book entitled Syntactic Structures. Instead of beginning the description with
phonology, as the structuralists who followed Bloomfield had done, Chomsky began with
syntax and argued that the part of the grammar which describes syntactic structures
should have priority as the creative component. By this view, the other two major parts of
grammar—semantics and phonology—are “interpretive components,” the purpose of
which is to act upon and assign meaning and sound to the structures generated by the
syntax. In characterizing the syntactic component of grammar as “creative,” Chomsky
brought attention to certain obvious but easily overlooked facts about English (and every
other natural language), and he pointed out inadequacies in existing systems of
descriptive grammar. The fact that speakers of English can recognize and produce
sentences which they have never before encountered suggests that the grammar which
describes English must provide for infinite syntactic novelty. But the grammar itself must
be a finite thing if one assumes that a goal of linguistic description is to account for the
knowledge—or, in a technical sense of the word, the “competence”—of a native speaker
of a language. Chomsky sketched a model of a grammar that was unlike existing
grammars in its ability to generate an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of
rules. In addition, he formalized the kind of rule necessary to show certain relationships
of meaning, as for example between an active sentence and its corresponding passive
form. These rules which show relationships are known as transformational rules, and the
system of description is known as generative grammar. In its revised forms in
Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (New York, 1965) and Lectures on
Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures (Dordrecht, Holland, 1981), it has become
the most influential system of linguistic description in the second half of the twentieth
century, and it has had a significant effect on the related disciplines of psychology and
sociology, as well as on the teaching of grammar in the schools. 72 During the past quarter
century a number of linguists have challenged, and others have
71
H.A.Gleason, An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics (rev. ed., New York, 1961) is a good
general treatment of linguistics from a structural point of view. See also G.L.Trager and H.L.Smith,
Jr., An Outline of English Structure (Norman, OK, 1951; Studies in Linguistics, Occasional Papers,
no. 3); C.C.Fries, The Structure of English (New York, 1952); and A.A.Hill, Introduction to
Linguistic Structures (New York, 1958), as well as the numerous publications of B.Bloch,
W.N.Francis, R.A.Hall, Z.S.Harris, C.F.Hockett, H.M.Hoenigswald, E.A.Nida, K.L.Pike,
M.Swadesh, W.F.Twaddell, and R.S.Wells, to mention only a few.
72
For the highly abstract phonology of generative grammar, the major work is by Noam Chomsky
and Morris Halle, The Sound Pattern of English (New York, 1968).