Ellen Hendrix

EN 721

July 18, 2001

Newmeyer, Frederick J. Linguistic Theory in America: The First Quarter-Century of Transformational

   Generative Grammar. New York: Academic Press, 1980.

Overview: Documents the origins, birth, and development of theory of Transformational Generative Grammar; combines a comprehensive account of the forging of modern linguistic theory with a detailed elaboration of its development.

Chapter 1: "The State of American Linguistics in the Mid 1950s"

Characterized by a widespread feeling that the fundamental problems of linguistic analysis had been solved; all that was left was to fill in the details.

Structuralist methodology attempted to classify the elements of language, believing that by starting with a corpus of utterances, a grammar could be constructed through successive segmentations and classifications. Meaning was simply to be avoided.

Empiricist assumptions dictated that all knowledge was based on experience alone; therefore, a child learned its grammar by applying elementary inductive principles to the raw speech data around it.

An interdisciplinary field of psycholinguistics emerged.

Chapter 2: "The Chomskyan Revolution"

In 1957, Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, the first serious attempt on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction a comprehensive theory of language.

Perceived by Structuralists to be a threat to their intellectual hegemony over the field.

By 1970, Transformational Generative Grammar was the "established" linguistic theory in the U. S.

Chapter 3: "From Syntactic Structures to Aspects of the Theory of Syntax"

A period of total agreement by Transformational Generative Grammarians on almost all major issues.

Three major works capped the progress of linguistic theory during this period:

Katz and Fodor (1963) "The Structure of Semantic Theory" - took the initial steps to incorporate semantics into linguistic theory

Katz and Postal (1964) An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions - hypothesized that underlying structures alone serve as input to the semantic component

Chomsky (1965) Aspects on the Theory of Syntax - allowed a level of "deep structure" to be defined by eliminating generalized transformations in favor of phrase structure recursion

Chapter 4: "The Late 1960s"

By late 1965, signs of division among Transformational-Generative Grammarians appeared.

John Robert Ross (MIT) and George Lakoff (Harvard) began challenging Chomsky’s analyses.

The primary point of contention centered on the abstractness of underlying syntactic structure.

Abstract Syntacticians concluded that Chomsky had been right–the deepest level of syntactic structure is semantic representation.

Linguistics entered the 1970s under Generative Semantic hegemony.

Chapter 5: "The Linguistics Wars"

A state of hostility existed between the two rival camps of theoreticians in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Around 1970, many saw Generative Semantics as being as important and dramatic a break from Classical Transformational Grammar as the latter had been from Structural Linguistics.

By 1972, Generative Semantics was on the defensive; its own adherents began to abandon ship.

Chapter 6: "Syntax in the 1970s: Constraining the Syntactic Rules"

The expressive power of Transformational rules was too great; even Chomsky conceded that the rules were so powerful that, as a consequence, Transformational Generative Grammar made rather weak claims about what could or could not be a possible human language.

Studies by Stanley Peters and Robert Ritchie proved that the weak generative capacity of a Transformational Grammar was that of an unrestricted rewriting system.

During the 1970s, constraint after constraint was put forward to limit the power of grammar.

Chapter 7: "On the Boundary of Formal Grammar"

Linguistic phenomena–pragmatic, perceptual, or "functional"–have traditionally either defied or resisted a strict grammatical treatment.

Such phenomena were initially dismissed from being investigated by linguists.

Then formal grammar was broadened to incorporate such phenomena.

More recently, linguists have readopted the position that the domain of formal grammar is limited and its properties constrained, yet the formal properties of the independent systems governing the behavior of these phenomena are amenable to systematic study.

Chapter 8: "Recent Developments in Syntax and Semantics"

Chomsky has developed a model whose major syntactical consequences follow Transformational rules and whose semantic consequences follow from a theory of enriched "surface structure."

Many linguists have challenged Chomsky’s reasoning: reduction of power of Transformational rules, if accompanied by an increase in the power of other rule types, does not lead to a more overall constrained grammar.

The Absolute Autonomy Thesis embodies two claims: (1) Semantic evidence may not be used to motivate the existence of a Transformational rule; (2) Semantic concepts may not appear in the formulation of a Transformational rule.

Relational Grammar asserts an interest in "grammatical relations" such as subject, direct object, and indirect object.

Montague Grammar believes that natural languages themselves can be constructed as formal languages.

Conclusion: Competing models have a common foundation–the recognition that a linguistic theory is a formal model of a speaker’s abstract linguistic competence. On the basis of this idealization, more has been learned about the nature of language in the past 25 years than in the previous 2500.