By Danny D. Steinberg, Natalia V.

Sciarini

Noam Chomsky is one of the most influential linguists of the twentieth century and still today he
dominates the scene of theoretical linguistics. He is most famous for his unique linguistic philosophy. He
has revolutionised the discipline of linguistics with his much-talked-about theory of Transformational
Generative Grammar (TGG), in which he emphasises the mental capacity of generating sentences with
the use of unconscious knowledge of language which he calls Universal Grammar (UG). He says, TGG
attempts to specify ‘what the speaker actually knows’ (Chomsky, 1965: 8). He asserts that human brain
is biologically programmed to learn language, so language faculty is innate.

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Noam Chomsky, one of the most famous linguists of the twentieth century, based his linguistic works on
certain philosophical doctrines. His main contribution to linguistics is Transformational Generative
Grammar, which is founded on mentalist philosophy. He opposes the behaviourist psychology in favour
of innatism for explaining the acquisition of language. He claims that it becomes possible for human
child to learn a language for the linguistic faculty with which the child is born, and that the use of
language for an adult is mostly a mental exercise. His ideas brought about a revolution in linguistics,
dubbed as Chomskyan Revolution. According to him, the part of language which is innate to human
being would be called Universal Grammar. His philosophy holds a strong propensity to rationalism in
search of a cognitive foundation.

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SYNTAX

As outlined in Syntactic Structures (1957), it comprised three sections, or

components: the phrase-structure component, the transformational
component, and the morphophonemic component. Each of these components
consisted of a set of rules operating upon a certain “input” to yield a certain
“output.” The notion of phrase structure may be dealt with independently of
its incorporation in the larger system. In the following system of rules, S
stands for Sentence, NP for Noun Phrase, VP for Verb Phrase, Det for
Determiner, Aux for Auxiliary (verb), N for Noun, and V for Verb stem.
It is meaningless to say that such and such language does not have any grammar. Now look at the
following two sentences of English. 1) I went home. 2)Went home I. Such arrangement or order of
lexical items (words) is known as syntax. And some rule in our brain tells that the correct order is
sentence 1 and not in sentence 2. Your mind can only help you about it when you are a native speaker
of English or know English well. Our brain needs some rules or principles.These rules process words and
parts of words to produce speech (utterances) or writing (sentences). Chomsky is mainly interested in
these rules and principles and feels that we can understand how the mind actually works if we can find
out how it produces language.This means that Chomsky`s approach to language is mentalist.

Any language whether English or Urdu or Hindi or any other language you can think of, was made up
of a number of well formed sentences.These sentences could be infinitive since it is possible to keep
making new sentences. According to Chomsky his grammar is generative because it can generate infinite
number of sentences. It is called transformational since a basic or simple sentence can be transformed into
a number of with same meaning. For Example : • I read the book. Can be transformed either with same
meaning: •The book is being read by me. Or with different meanings: • Do I read the book? • I read the book
don’t I ? • I do not read the book. 

What we have done is that we transformed the basic sentence by adding words, deleting words and
above all by movement of words (Paradigmatic V/s Syntagmatic) .These changes are called
transformational rules.Thus grammar generates and transforms sentences. It can therefor be called ~
TRANFORMATIONAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR _ TG for short.

DEEP SURFACE STRUCTURE A Deep structure is underlying form of a sentence (in mind) before
application of rules. After application of rules the result of phonetic form which is ready to speak is
known as Surface structure. For example if you see , a dog bites a cat. Deep structure in your mind The
cat was bitten by a dog. The utterance is surface structure.

Noam Chomsky believed that native speaker of a language , however carry the grammar of their
language in their minds.They know the structure of there knowledge. Now some how this is very near to
the sociolinguistic approach. Chomsky distinguished the underlying knowledge of language from th
language actually used in practice. According to Chomsky language performance may be effected by the
following things •memory • stamina • attentionetc. Therefor the theory of language should be
competence when the competence started to develop the performance of language took place. Both
COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE are cognitive abilities.

Competence is a person`s subconscious linguistic ability to create and understand sentences including to
sentences they never heard before. • Competence is a person`s acquisition with a set of grammatical
rules including components such as semantics, phonology, morphology, syntax etc. Competence enables
native speaker to recognize ambiguous sentences. AND • Performance is the real world linguistic output.
• Performance is the spoken medium or the utilization competence and it may carry speech errors.
Competence is the speaker/hearer`s knowledge of his/her language. And Performance is the actual
usage of language in concrete situations. (Chomsky 1965:4)

Basaha ni

As an essentialist, Chomsky distinguishes between competence and performance. Competence is the

knowledge of language – a tacit grasp of the structural properties of all the sentences of a language.
Performance involves actual real-time use and may diverge radically from the underlying competence
due to environmental disturbances and memory limitations. Competence enables people to generate all
possible grammatical sentences. Performance is the transformation of this competence into everyday
speech. Chomsky proposed that linguistic theory should explain the mental processes that underlie the
use of language. That is, the subject matter of linguistics will be competence, not performance.

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE (LAD)

We have been talking about rules and principles and competence etc. what actually these are? And
where they are in a human body? Lets try to find out. Remember that producing a sentence in a
language can be compared to the process of getting result out of a computer.The computer is
programmed and arranges according to the instructions given to it. It is equipped to process information
in a certain way. Sup- -pose the human brain too has some device which can help it to process language,
what would it do?This device which Chomsky called the language acquisition device or LAD for short
would have the capacity to arrange the lexical units of any human language acco- -rding to the same
general universal principles.Then there will be variation according to the language which we are using.

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Natural Grammar, Mind and Speaker Performance, Chomsky's syntax-based grammar

Universal Grammar
According to Chomsky, Universal Grammar (UG) is the
system of principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or
properties common to all languages – the essence of human
language. All human beings share part of their knowledge of
language. UG is their common possession regardless of which
language they speak. The rules of UG provide the basic
blueprint that all languages follow. UG theory attempts to clarify the relatively quick
acquisition of the mother tongue on the basis of minimum
exposure to external input. Learning would be impossible
without universal language-specific knowledge.

BASHA -explanation- What is Chomsky's interpretation of the language faculty?

Chomsky says that human babies are born with the core linguistic sense common to all language, which
helps them to acquire any specific language from the environment. According to Chomsky, the language
faculty is part of our biological endowment, and as such it is largely genetically determined.

slide-
Neuropsychologist Eric Lenneberg in his
Biological Foundations of Language (1967) lends support to
Chomsky’s view. He says the capacity to learn a language is
indeed innate, and, like many such inborn mechanisms, it is
circumscribed in time. If a child does not learn a language
before the onset of puberty, the child will never master
language at all, as claimed in the critical period hypothesis.
next slide

According to Chomsky, although grammars

differ from one another, their basic forms – deep structures –
are universal; that is, at the deepest neuropsychic level, there
exists a universal or archetypal grammar, on which all
individual grammars are based.

basaha char char

Chomsky’s proposal bears an

affinity with the concept of archetype theorized by noted Swiss
psychiatrist Carl Jung. According to Jung, human beings are
born with certain inherited modes of functioning rooted in
collective unconscious, referred to as archetypes. Archetypes
are conceived as innate neuropsychic centres possessing the
capacity to initiate, control, and mediate the common
behavioural characteristics and typical experiences of all
human beings.

Universal grammar

Principle & prarmeter

"Children's analysis of language input is strictly constrained and channeled by UG."

UG as a set of abstract principles which are properties (core grammar) of all language in the world.

Psychology and SLA

The Nature of Knowledge- Neurolinguistics

Neurolinguistics
Brain lateralization
Hemispheric specialization
Increased maturation & less plasticity

Monitor Model
Stephan Krashen

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Grammatical competence thus defines an innate knowledge of rules rather than knowledge of items or
relations. It is said to be innate because one apparently does not have to be trained to acquire it and it
can be applied to an unlimited number of previously unheard examples.

Competence is the pre-vocal condition of a speaker. Whenever we have to utter something, we thought
about same into our mind.