Contemporary Linguistics and Cognitive Science - реферат українською

Noam Chomsky

Sobel S.P. The Cognitive Sciences:

An Interdisciplinary Approach. – London; Toronto:

Mayfield Publishing Company, 2001. – pp. 159-167.

The impetus that set the field of linguistics on its current path came
from the publication of Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957) and
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965). These works ignited a revolution
in linguistics, placing it squarely back into the domain of the mind and
determining the direction it has followed ever since.

What Chomsky contributed initially was a shift of focus to the
(vast and largely unconscious) set of rules he hypothesized must exist
in the minds of speakers and hearers in order for them to produce and
understand their native language or languages. Like P?nini, he was
concerned with discovering, isolating, and pinpointing these rules, to
make their formulation precise and predictive. But, as a 20th-century
researcher, he was working within the contemporary framework of science.
Scientific effort requires abandoning vagueness in favor of focusing on
the observable specifics, which alone lead to productive hypotheses. But
unlike the behaviorists, Chomsky based his hypothesis on the assumption
of a capacity in the brain that functions without the conscious
awareness of the person in whom this functioning is taking place, and
which it is indeed possible and profitable to study. The data provided
by language permit us to infer what must be taking place as language is
produced. In the process, Chomsky proposed a method of formalizing the
rules of the components of language. In view of the impact on and
pervasiveness of this approach in linguistic research in the second half
of the 20th century, a brief introduction is in order.

The first component of language Chomsky addressed was the syntactic
component—the portion of one's linguistic competence that handles the
arrangement of words into sentences. A simple sentence serves as an
example of what formal rules must contain if they are to be capable of
generating such a sentence:

The cat chased a mouse.

This sentence contains five separate words, some of which—the cat, a
mouse— "feel" as though, when taken together, they form a somewhat
larger unit. The words in each grouping must occur in this order *cat
the and *mouse a are not permissible English combinations. (The asterisk
preceding each such formulation is, by convention, a sign that what
follows is not grammatical in the language.) It is also true that in
English one or the other of these combinations may come first and the
verb, in this case chased, must come between them. The following
ordering would also be fine for English, though it expresses a somewhat
unusual situation:

A mouse chased the cat.

Also perfectly good sentences of English are these two:

A cat chased the mouse.

The mouse chased a cat.

A rule that would specify that these four orderings are just those that

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