Linguistics

Second year

Generative linguistics (Noam Chomsky)

 Mentalism
 Universal grammar
 Competence an performance
 Deep structure and surface structure

Who is Noam Chomsky?

Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,

cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father
of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the
founders of the field of cognitive science. He holds a joint appointment as Institute Professor
Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Laureate Professor at the
University of Arizona, and is the author of more than 100 books on topics such as linguistics,
war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and
libertarian socialism.

Introduction
The new linguistics, which began in 1957 with the publication of Noam Chomsky's
Syntactic Structures, deserves the label 'revolutionary’. After 1957, the study of grammar
would no longer be limited to what is said and how it is interpreted. In fact, the word grammar
itself took on a new meaning. The new linguistics defined grammar as our innate,
subconscious ability to generate language, an internal system of rules that constitutes our
human language capacity. The goal of the new linguistics was to describe this internal
grammar

1- Mentalistic Theory and Language Learning

The mentalistic theory of language learning, deveIoped in America by Noam Chomsky,
fırst and later by Eric H. Lenneberd (a neuropsychologist), came up as a reaction against the
Behavioristic language learning theory. The major principle of Mentalistic language
acquisition theory is that"everybody learns a language, not because they are subjected to a
similar conditioning process, but because they possess an inborn capacity which permits them
to acquire a language as a normal Maturational Process" In 1965. In a book titled “Aspects of
the Theory of Syntax‟, Chomsky claimed that there are innate properties of language because
a child masters his native language in a very short time in spite of the highly abstract nature of
rules. Chomsky’s own speculations about the psychological realities underlying language
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development include the hypothesis that the rules or principles underlying linguistic behavior
are abstract and innate.

 Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Mentalist language learning theory believe that the learning capacity of human being
by definition is not only universal but also innate, and this innate capacity is not something to
be obtained socially. ln other words, language learning is not socially oriented. Then,
language learning and its environment must be viewed as a biologically acquired process
rather than a resuIt of social learning. In the end, the Chomskian doctrine came up to support
the fact that universals of language were a set of rules programmed in the brains of only and
only human infants.
LAD is an innate property "whose, nature and mode of operation are inviolable. It has
the folIowing features:
a) The power to differentiate speech sounds from each other
b) The capacity to organize linguistic events in various classes that can easily be redefined
afterwards.
c) Knowledge specifying the possible linguistic system and rejecting the impossible and
inadmissible ones,
d) Data-selecting ability, its constant evaluation. in an advancing linguistics system and of the
linguistic data that are encountered

2- Universal Grammar

universal grammar (UG) (noun): a theory in linguistics usually credited to Noam

Chomsky that suggests that the ability to learn grammar is built into the human brain from
birth regardless of language

In the 1960s, linguists became interested in a new theory about grammar, or the laws of
language. The theory was popularized by an American linguist named Noam Chomsky who
often focused on the effortless language learning of young children.

Chomsky didn’t believe that exposure to a language was enough for a young child to
become efficient at understanding and producing a language. He believed that humans are
born with an innate ability to learn languages. According to Chomsky’s theory, the basic
structures of language are already encoded in the human brain at birth.

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 This “universal grammar theory” suggests that every language has some of the same laws.
For example, every language has a way to ask a question or make something negative.

In addition, every language has a way to identify gender or show that something
happened in the past or present. If the basic grammar laws are the same for all languages, a
child needs only to follow the particular set of rules that his peers follow in order to
understand and produce their native language. In other words, his environment determines
which language he will use, but he is born with the tools to learn any language effectively.

Universal Grammar Principles and Theory

The Universal Grammar theory is based on several key principles. Some of these
principles include:

 The existence of innate linguistic knowledge in all humans

 The presence of shared linguistic structures across languages
 The ability to acquire language without explicit teaching or feedback

Under the UG framework, languages are considered to be composed of different levels,

with each level containing specific rules and principles that govern the structure and use of the
language. Within this framework, Chomsky distinguishes between:

Competence Internalized linguistic knowledge possessed by an individual

Performance An individual's actual use of language in speech or writing

Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar also introduces the idea of a Language

Acquisition Device (LAD) within the human brain. This LAD is believed to be responsible
for understanding the structure of a language and applying its underlying principles. It is
hypothesized that the LAD allows children to effortlessly and rapidly acquire language skills
in their early years.

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Characteristics of Universal Grammar

According to the Universal Grammar theory, there are several key characteristics that all
languages share. Some of these shared traits include:

1. Structure-dependence: Grammatical rules apply consistently based on the structure

of the language, not on the specific words used.
2. Recursion: The ability to create potentially infinite sentences or phrases through the
nesting of clauses or phrases within other clauses or phrases.
3. Modularity: Different components of linguistic competence function independently
but are interconnected. These components include syntax, semantics, and phonology.
4. Displacement: The capacity for humans to refer to objects, events, and concepts that
are not present in the immediate environment.

Universal Grammar is a critical concept in the understanding of what makes human

language unique. Its principles suggest the existence of an innate linguistic ability that allows
the rapid acquisition of language, and highlights the shared underlying structure across
different languages.

An example of recursion in language: “The cat, which was chased by the dog, quickly
climbed the tree.” This sentence demonstrates the embedding of one clause inside another,
resulting in a more complex structure.

Examples of Universal Grammar in English Language

Syntax is the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a

language. It is one of the key areas where Universal Grammar can be observed when
examining the English language. The following examples show some common syntactic
structures that support the theory of Universal Grammar:

1. Word order: In English, the typical word order follows a subject-verb-object (SVO)
pattern. This structure is essential for conveying meaning and understanding
sentences. For example: "The cat chased the mouse."

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 2. Phrase structure: The formation of sentences using verb phrases (VP), noun phrases
(NP), adjective phrases (AdjP), and prepositional phrases (PP) demonstrate a common
structure shared across languages. For instance, within a simple sentence like "The
happy dog played in the park," there are different phrase structures acting together,
such as NP "The happy dog" and PP "in the park."
3. Agreement: In English, subjects and verbs must agree in number (singular or plural).
For example, in the sentence "The students are reading books," there is agreement
between the plural subject "students" and the plural verb "are."
4. Negation: The existence of linguistic devices to express negativity is a common
feature across languages. In English, we can use auxiliary verbs combined with "not"
or contractions like "don't" and "can't" to convey negation. For example, "She does not
like pizza" or "They can't swim."

5. Questions: English questions, like many other languages, usually follow a specific
structure to differentiate from declarative sentences. For instance, changing the word
order and using auxiliary verbs, such as "Is the cat sleeping?" and "Where did you
go?"

3. Competence and Performance

Chomsky separates competence and performance; he describes 'competence' as an

idealized capacity that is located as a psychological or mental property or function and
„performance‟ as the production of actual utterances. In short, competence involves
“knowing” the language and performance involves “doing” something with the language. The
difficulty with this construct is that it is very difficult to assess competence without assessing
performance. A person's linguistic competence is his tacit knowledge of his language in how
to produce and understand an indefinite number of utterances never heard before. However,
performance is considered to be the physical representation, usually in utterances of any type
of the human competence which refers to how someone uses language
Competence: he defines the competence of the speaker as his “mastery of the rules, of
the system of his language by virtue of which he is able to recognize grammatical deficiencies
and ambiguities”. In other words it is «the ideal speaker-hearer‘s knowledge of his language».
Competence is, as it were, the perfect storehouse of linguistics knowledge. In order to
illustrate this, Chomsky gives his famous example “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”. In
terms of grammar, this is a correct sentence(S+V+C). However, in terms of the meaning it

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 cannot be interpreted coherently. Performance: is “the actual use of language in concrete
situations”. Chomsky attempts to formulate hypotheses about competence by idealizing
performance, that is, by dredging away performance accidents such as hesitations,
unnecessary repetition, lack of intention, fatigue, slips of the tongue, false starts. Competence
and Performance are not exactly equivalents to Saussure’s Langue and Parole because
Saussure describes langue as a social product or a connection of necessary conventions that
have been adopted by a social body. However, Chomsky regards competence as the property
of the mind of the individual which is developed as part of his general maturation.
Example:
1- Bill ate an orange.
2- An orange is eaten by Bill.
3- Orange Bill was by an eaten.
Sentence 3 is ungrammatical, for it makes no semantic meaning although the units
which make of it a meaningless sentence are the same words which make of
sentences 1, 2 perfectly meaningful . According to Chomsky, our complete
knowledge and mastery of the grammatical rules (competence) decides upon the
grammaticality or ungrammaticality of sentences. Chomsky is interested in
competence and his interest marks the clearest difference between structuralism
and TG. Structuralism was text-based and only interested in language that had
actually occurred .TG does not use text since it is more interested in what produced
the text than in the text itself.

3. Surface and Deep Structure

One of the most important concepts proposed by Chomsky is the concept of surface
and deep structure. The Generativism paradigm claims that the concept of structural analysis
proposed by Structuralism paradigm is too swallow, it only reaches the level of surface
structure. Surface structure can be defined as the syntactic form they take as actual sentences.
In the other words, it is forms of sentences resulted from modification/ transformation.
Consider these sentences: (1) You close the door. (2) The door is closed by you. (3) Close the
door!

The first sentence is active, second is passive, and the last is imperative. However,
if you take a look those closely, you will find that those three are very closely related, even
identical. They seem to be identical, since they have the same underlying abstract
representation that is called deep structure. It is defined as an abstract level of structural

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organization in which all the elements determining structural interpretation are represented. If
you want to analyze the relation of those three sentences, the first you have to know about the
deep structure of them, since deep structure is the input of transformation rules. You cannot
apply transformation rules if you don‟t have deep structure. transformation rules are sets of
rules which will change or move constituents in the structures derive from the phrase structure
rules.