TRADITIONALLY OR OTHERWISE NONLINGUISTICALLY ORIENTED LANGUAGE TEACHERS WILL FIND IN THE NEW GENERATIVE-TRANSFORMATION GRAMMAR A REFUTATION OF MANY OF THE CURRENTLY ACCEPTED LINGUISTIC (SPECIFICALLY STRUCTURALIST) TEACHINGS AND A CONFIRMATION OF SOME TRADITIONAL IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE LEARNING. FOR INSTANCE, THE TRADITIONAL SPELLING OF ENGLISH (ALSO…

Some aspects of a theory of grammar are presented which derive from a formal theory of language acquisition. One aspect of the theory is a universal constraint on analyzability known as the Freezing Principle, which supplants a variety of constraints proposed in the literature. A second aspect of the theory is the Invariance Principle, a…

SOUND LANGUAGE TEACHING RESTS ON THREE THEORETICAL BASES. THE FIRST OF THESE, A HYPOTHESIS OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, MAY BE ORIENTED TOWARD THE COGNITIVE APPROACH OR THE PERCEPTIVE APPROACH OR MAY REFLECT THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE BEHAVIORIST. THE SECOND, A MODEL OF GRAMMAR, MAY BE THE PRODUCT OF THE TRADITIONALIST, THE STRUCTURALIST, THE…

This paper discusses the development of structuralism in psychology, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology by citing theories supported by thinkers in all these fields. The contrast between structure (schema, pattern, gestalt) and function (activity, interaction, transformation) is used as the point of departure for the…

It is possible to examine the development of English wh-questions in first and second language learners and to detect regularities in the order of emergence of certain linguistic structures. It is also possible to speculate whether the stages in language acquisition correspond to the transformational derivation in transformational grammar. The…