Sketches Noam Chomsky's conception of language, the ways it can and should be studied, and how it works as a scientific enterprise. (Author/GT)

In the years following the appearance of Noam Chomsky's book, "Syntactic Structures," in 1957, transformational grammarians modified and improved his initial model of language. The notion of a deep structure of meaning underlying a sentence's surface structure was revised to embody elements representing negation, command, and interrogation, and to…

This paper discusses the validity and role of linguistic theory in terms of philosophy and logic and considers the relationship among these fields of human knowledge. The main objective of linguistic science is to discover the composition laws actually used by speech communities at any given moment in history. Linguistics is therefore not…

Two traditions are distinguishable in modern linguistic theory: the tradition of "universal grammar" which flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the tradition of structural or descriptive linguistics which reached its peak 15 or 20 years ago. Universal grammar was concerned with (1) the relation of deep structure to surface forms and to…

Transformational grammar offers the most adequate system by which to meet the goal of grammar instruction, which is to increase the student's understanding of the nature of language. This grammar attempts to explain the mental processes underlying the production and understanding of sentences, to describe linguistic competence, to construct…

This volume contains the papers presented at a workshop which brought together authorities from several different disciplines, each working in the area of natural language analysis, to participate in intensive, technical discussions of the issues involved in developing adequate grammars and semantics of natural languages. The disciplines…