Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky (1928)

is considered the "the

father of modern linguistics.
Chomsky is the father of modern linguistics
not only because of the details of his theory,
but because the new way in which he
approached the study of language.

His Generative Grammar's main objective is the scientific

explanation rather than the mere description of the complex
grammar relations that conform a language and the problem
of language acquisition

Generativism
The basis to Chomsky's linguistic theory is rooted in
biolinguistics, holding that the principles underlying the
structure of language are biologically determined in the
human mind and hence genetically transmitted
He argues that all humans share the same
underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of
sociocultural differences.
The Chomskyan approach towards
linguistics studies grammar as an innate
body of knowledge possessed by language
users, often termed Universal
Grammar (UG)
Strongest evidence for the existence of Ug is
simply the fact that children successfully acquire
their native language in short time.

Transformational grammar
In linguistics, a transformational grammar or transformational-generative
grammar (TG, TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural
language, that involves the use of defined operations
called transformations to produce new sentences from existing ones.

Transformational grammar
He developed the idea that each sentence in a
language has two levels of representation:

Surfacesu
structure

Transfer

Surface structure can

be defined as the
syntactic form they
take as actual
sentences.

Example:
(1a) The bear was chased by the lion.
(1b) The lion chased the bear.

Deep Structure
Deep structure is a
pure representation
of thematic
relations.

Two sentences are distinct surface

forms that derive from a common
deep structure.