A Companion to Chomsky. Группа авторов
as either the Chomsky hierarchy or the Chomsky‐Schützenberger hierarchy (Chomsky & Schützenberger 1963). Tim Hunter's chapter (Chapter 5) provides an extensive introduction to this hierarchy and also discusses its application to human languages, a central research objective in formal linguistics ever since Chomsky's fundamental work on this topic.
However, Chomsky himself quite quickly turned away from this purely formal interest, and from around 1960 began to pursue in print what he always regarded as the more fundamental questions concerning the human ability to acquire and use language, which he proposed was due to a faculty of Universal Grammar (UG).5 UG is the name for whatever innate mechanisms humans are born with which are specific to language ability and which enable them to acquire language. What they acquire includes an internal grammar (their I‐language in the current terminology) that is characterized in terms of the kind of recursive rule system mentioned above, thus explaining the ability of a finite brain to produce and understand a potential infinity of novel sentences.
One kind of striking phenomenon that can serve as a useful introduction to Chomsky's psychological theories in this regard are what he sometimes calls “fine thoughts,” or what we will call “WhyNots.” These are strings of words that native speakers of a language find unacceptable, even though they can pretty readily guess what someone could mean by them: they would seem to express “perfectly fine thoughts” (cf. Chomsky 1962, p. 531; 2013a, p. 41; 2015, p. 98). Innumerable examples can be found in the literature, but one particular sort is interesting because it appears to be indisputably universal, i.e., true of all human languages.6
Consider the perfectly reasonable English sentence that a child might hear, Mommy and Daddy will feed Fido. Now, someone unsure of hearing this sentence could ask the “echo” questions, Mommy and Daddy will feed who? or Mommy and who will feed Fido?, and in any language like English that moves interrogative (or wh‐) words, they could also ask the first one by asking, Who will Mommy and Daddy feed? But, curiously, in no language in which the interrogative could be moved, could they ask the second one by: *Who will Mommy and feed Fido? Indeed, in no language can one extract an interrogative from a conjunction.7
The question for linguistics is: Why not? Surely no one ever teaches a child such a rule. Nor does such a rule seem to be merely a tacit convention, since alternatives to it never occur. Indeed, it's extremely unlikely that the child ever hears or tries to produce such a sentence. It's hard to resist the suggestion that Chomsky pursued on the basis of this and innumerable similar phenomena that human children are somehow innately constrained to form some but not others of a potential infinity of strings of words. And Chomsky's main proposal at this stage was that these constraints could and should be capturable by formal and explicit theories of grammatical structure of the sort he had studied earlier, but which are in some way or another the result of innate features of the human brain.
The chapters included in this first section are as follows. In Chapter 3, Artemis Alexiadou and Terje Lohndal provide an answer for two questions about generative grammar: Where are we now? And how did we get there? They explain how the Principles and Parameters approach emerged from early Phrase Structure grammars of the 1950s and 1960s. They also set out the underlying ideas leading to Government and Binding (GB) theory and later to the current Minimalist Program, alongside identifying some prominent contemporary areas of research.
Lisa Lai‐Sheng Cheng and James Griffiths (Chapter 4) consider some enduring discoveries that the Chomskyan program of research has contributed, focusing on empirically supported assertions relating to nonlocal dependencies and the explanatory role of gaps or empty categories. The generalizations they discuss are cross‐linguistically robust, which also means that they serve as useful diagnostic tools.
As already mentioned, Hunter (Chapter 5) provides an introduction to the Chomsky hierarchy, and a review of recent discussions of it. He focuses on the key intuitions from this highly mathematical work and how they can be applied to theoretical linguistics. Notably, Hunter argues that the lasting contributions of the Chomsky hierarchy are more significant than previous assessments would suggest.
Chomsky has mostly worked on syntax, but in a groundbreaking study of the sound patterns of English, Chomsky and Morris Halle (1968) launched a new framework for phonology construed as the study of the mental representations of speech sounds, which, like those of syntax, also turn out to have complex structure. This book was enormously influential and led to a great deal of cross‐linguistic work based on the general approach Chomsky and Halle developed. In Chapter 6, Charles Reiss and Veno Volenec argue that, notwithstanding its status as a landmark in phonology, some of its most important implications have been neglected by the field, and remain to be exploited.
In the last chapter in this section (Chapter 7), Lila Gleitman offers a personal and historical perspective on how Chomsky's work engages with and fits into cognitive science more generally, in particular in experimental work on language acquisition. She explains how her initial prejudice in favor of non‐nativism – i.e., that children learn the vast bulk of their linguistic knowledge from the input they receive – was challenged at every stage by her experimental findings.
1.3 Part II: Contemporary Issues in Syntax
Over the past 70 years, since the work that led up to his (1951) MA thesis on Hebrew8, Chomsky has developed and revised his ideas, sometimes radically, often in reaction to work that emerged in the large community of linguists working within the generative framework. As Alexiadou and Lohndal's chapter makes clear, the differences from one period to another may be quite substantial, yet the core questions that are being addressed are often rather similar. Each new path attracted new students and scholars, but some scholars also decided to stick to the previous path (cf. Sells 1985). As such, the new ideas have also led to a rather dynamic community, and sometimes controversy as to what is the best way forward.
Often, the theory has been developed based on a small set of data (e.g., so‐called “expletive” constructions in English such as There were many students in her class/It is raining today, where the There and It are semantically vacuous). But then the theory makes numerous predictions about other areas of the grammar that can then be tested and, as a result, the theory is often revised. This is just normal science, in which theories are frequently revised and sometimes replaced as new evidence is considered and greater depth achieved.
Some opponents of Chomsky have criticized him for being too focused on English, or for not caring enough about the coverage of data from the thousands of the world's languages. Apart from his master's thesis on Hebrew, it is fair to say that Chomsky has not personally worked on a large number of languages. However, generativists have pursued comparative syntax across languages from many different families from Amharic to Zoque – including both spoken and sign languages (see e.g. Lasnik and Lohndal 2013; Allott and Rey 2017). This work was one of the considerations that led directly to the Principles and Parameters approach, which proposes that UG is a combination of fixed principles and variable parameters – e.g. whether a verb precedes its direct object or vice versa – which are set during language acquisition on the basis of what the child hears. In fact, as Mark Baker's chapter makes clear, Chomsky's work has contributed significantly to the study of linguistic diversity.
Of course, the languages of the world at least superficially appear to vary widely. Appreciating the cross‐linguistic evidence, using it to triangulate on UG, and to show how,