Chapter Three Major Developmental Phases of Chomsky's Linguistic TheorySince the turning out of his first book Syntactic Structure in which he formulated his transformational grammar, Chomsky has updated his extensively-applied linguistic notions with more lectures given and books issued. It is commonly recognized to be five phases.Phase One: Transformational GrammarIt is impossible to understand Chomsky’s linguistic notions without understanding his transformational grammar which is undoubtedly a milestone in the history of modern linguistics. Prior to the publication of Syntactic Structure in 1957, the linguistic study was mainly concerned with structuralism. Structural linguistics, with its insistence on objective methods of verification and precisely specified techniques of discovery, derives from the "behavioral sciences" approach to the study of man, and is also largely a consequence of the philosophical assumptions of logical positivism.During that period, most American linguists, according to Chomsky，defined the task of linguistics as “collecting language elements and classifying them”(Chomsky 1970:100). The approach was the mechanic procedure to find the language truth and discipline. Linguistics was a kind of verbal botany. Linguists at that time were just giving a description of a language by colleting data, colleting a large number of utterances of language. These utterances were always recorded on a tape recorder or in a phonetic script. The second step was to classify these elements of language at different linguistic levels, from the units of sounds, the phonemes, to the morphemes, then to the sequences of word classes. The study target was the rich language elements and structuralism was inductive with a word-grammar.However, with the language ability as the study target, TG aims to establish some theories, by means of which we can make sure which rules form the basis of language structure. The aim of linguistic theory was to provide the linguist with a set of rigorous methods, a set of discovery procedures which he would use to extract from the "corpus" the phonemes, the morphemes, and so on. Its approach is puttingforward hypothesis which is to be tested by native language speakers. Therefore, TG is a deductive language-category grammar which can explain infinite sentences with limited analyses.John R. Searle concludes that:Chomsky argued that since any language contains an infinite number of sentences, any "corpus," even if it contained as many sentences as there are in all the books of the Library of Congress, would still be trivially small. Instead of the appropriate subject matter of linguistics being a randomly or arbitrarily selected set of sentences, the proper object of study was the speaker's underlying knowledge of the language, his "linguistic competence" that enables him to produce and understand sentences he has never heard before.(Searle 1972: 29)Once the conception of the "corpus" as the subject matter is rejected, then the notion of mechanical procedures for discovering linguistic truths goes as well. Chomsky argues that no science has a mechanical procedure for discovering the truth anyway. Rather, what happens is that the scientist formulates hypotheses and tests them against evidence. Linguistics is no different: the linguist makes conjectures about linguistic facts and tests them against the evidence provided by native speakers of the language. He has in short a procedure for evaluating rival hypotheses, but no procedure for discovering true theories by mechanically processing evidence.The Transformational Grammar can be expressed in the following way:1 .Two levels of representation of the structure of sentences: an underlying, more abstract form, termed 'deep structure', and the actual form of the sentence produced, called 'surface structure'. Deep structure is represented in the form of a hierarchical tree diagram, or "phrase structure tree," depicting the abstract grammatical relationships between the words and phrases within a sentence.2. A system of formal rules specifying how deep structures are to be transformed into surface structures.Like a revolution, the transformational grammar established the basis for other subsequent theories of human grammatical knowledge. Since Chomsky's original presentation, many different theories have emerged. With the notion of a transformation remaining a central element in most models, concepts like deep structure and surface structure, phrase structure tree, phrase structure rules, verb phrase, noun phrase, creativity/ productivity became the grammatical elements in language study.Phase Two: Language Competence and Performance; Standard TheoryIn Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965, Chomsky put forward two sets of concepts, which are now widely known. One is competence and performance and the other deep structure and surface structure. Chomsky defines competence as the ideal user's knowledge of the rules of his or her language, and performance the actual realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication.According to Chomsky，speakers have internalized a set of rules about their language. This rule system enables them to produce and understand an infinitely large number of sentences and recognize sentences that are ungrammatical and ambiguous. Chomsky holds that linguists should study the ideal speaker's competence, because the speaker's performance is too haphazard to be studied. Thus, the task of the linguists is to discover the speaker's internalized rules. Competence is independent from performance. The difference between them is like that between knowledge of language and use of that language. Although the investigation of competence is challenging because of the complexity of our knowledge of language, performance is observable. From this point, Chomsky began to look at language from a psychological point of view and consider linguistic competence as a property of the mind of a speaker.In order to explain the difference between "performance" (all sentences that an individual will ever use) and "competence" (all sentences that an individual can utter,but will not necessarily utter), Chomsky emphasizes the existence of some innate knowledge. Chomsky proves that the grammar of a natural language cannot be reduced to a finite-state automaton. He then argues for the existence of two levels of language: an underlying deep structure, which accounts for the fundamental syntactic relationships among language components, and a surface structure, which accounts for the sentences that are actually uttered, and which is generated by transformations of elements in the deep structure. Transformational analysis does overcome the limitations of phrase structure.Chomsky divides the knowledge of language into two components: a universal grammar, which is the knowledge of language possessed by every human, and a set of parameter values and a lexicon, which together constitute the knowledge of a particular language. On the whole, the various components of the grammar as articulated in Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) are: the base component, transformational rules, the lexicon (the set of lexical items with syntactic, semantic, and phonological information), semantic interpretation rules, and the phonological component. Then comes the other distinctive feature of the second phase is the establishment of the Standard Theory, which defines a grammar as made of a syntactic component (phrase structure rules, lexicon and transformational component), a semantic component and a phonological component. The deep structure of a sentence is a tree (the phrase marker) that contains all the words that will appear in its surface structure.By including an account of the relation between sound and meaning in the construction of a grammar, Chomsky started coupling syntax and semantics. In this sense the "standard theory" syntax provides the mechanisms for transforming a meaning (a deep structure) into a phonetic representation (a surface structure).Phase Three: Extended Standard TheoryIn early transformational generative grammar, it was assumed that all semantic interpretation would be done off deep structure, but with the proposals for the extended standard theory (EST) of Chomsky came the realization that certain aspects of semantic interpretation, such as focus and presupposition and scope of quantifiers,must be done off surface structure. More recent developments suggest that EST did not go far enough. In Reflections on Language 1975, Chomsky made a good non-technical review of the EST and various philosophical issues related to generative grammar.In fact, the label 'Extended Standard Theory' was used for a while during the 1970's to describe a particular stage in the evolution of the framework. Over the next 15 years, the framework experienced great revision and changes.Phase Four: REST, GBBy the early 1980's a framework of syntactic theory had been developed, which became different enough to require a completely new presentation and a distinctive period.In 1980 Chomsky delivered a series of lectures at Pisa which were published in the subsequent year under the title 'Lectures on Government and Binding'. These lectures essentially presented the new framework for the first time in an organized, relatively coherent form. As a result, the title of the book was very swiftly given to the framework, which consequently is referred to by many as 'Government & Binding' or 'GB'. GB theory develops directly and without a radical break from earlier work in transformational generative grammar, in particular, from research that falls within the framework of the Extended Standard Theory.Government theory deals with the relationship between a syntactic head (e.g., a verb or preposition) and its dependents and binding theory, the relations among anaphors, pronominals, referring expressions, and their possible antecedents in sentences. 'Government & Binding' has been taken for the label 'Revised, Extended Standard Theory', often abbreviated 'REST'. Chomsky (1985) published Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use, in which the concepts of principles and parameters approach, typically abbreviated `P&P' or `PPA', took the place of former rules.The principle advantage of the Principle and Parameters framework lies in its potential for solving "Plato's Problem": how children can acquire their first language with such remarkable speed and efficiency. The principles do not generalize but the approach might be suggestive both in its achievements and apparent boundaries. Along with developments in other fields, especially immunology, it is regarded as a task of selection rather than that of instruction. The idea can be expressed like: everything is already laid out in the child's mind and the acquisition of knowledge lies in selecting particular choices from what has been laid out.Phase Five: Minimalist ProgramIn the 1990s Chomsky formulated a "Minimalist Program" in an attempt to simplify the symbolic representations of the language facility. The MP remains a version of the P&P model and thus enjoys the benefit of reducing the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy. Specific rules and constructions were being abstracted and subsumed under parameterised principles, which were then attributed to the initial state of the language faculty. In general, there are two aspects of this program: first, the minimisation of linguistic levels; second, the economy principles of derivation and representation.Although Chomsky's core ideas and their psychological implications have already formed during the first half of the 20th century, he never stops his revision of his own inventions. Minimalism is a manifestation of Chomsky's intellectual vigor in revision and regarded as the most radical of the periodic upheavals in his thinking.Although this paper have divided the development of Chomsky's language notions into the above five phases, it is no doubt that he has never stopped his devotion to language study and we also see the Post-Chomsky Linguistics which included three major tendencies. The first tendency is generative semantics, which motivates syntactic rules by means of semantic evidence. The second one is the upholding of the viewpoint like "Deep structures are universal" and "All languages have the same deep structure."A third tendency is the constantly increasing employment of the conceptual and terminological apparatus of modern formal logic and formal semantics.Chomsky Noam. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1985.Searle John. Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics. The New York Review of Books, 1972.Chomsky Noam, Syntactic Structure . Paris: Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, 1970.Chomsky Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1965.。
