December 7th is Noam Chomsky’s birthday, so I’d like to dedicate this post to his contributions to Linguistics.

Noam Chomsky is the father of modern Linguistics. Back in 1957, Chomsky with his revolutionary book Syntactic Structures laid the foundation of his non-empiricist theory of language. Two years later, with his review of B. F. Skinner’ Verbal Behavior, he showed that Behaviorism, the dominant approach to language at the time, was no longer to be the way of studying language.

Chomsky’s major contribution to studying language was that he made it scientific. He demonstrated that despite the observable variety of the world’s languages, there is in reality only one language. All other languages; dead, still spoken or even future ones, are variations of a single theme. After Chomsky, linguistics is defined as “The Scientific Study of Language”, “language” in the singular. Linguistics, much like the other sciences, has the following three characteristics: first, it provides a general theory that explains why languages are the way they are: there is a universal basis, or faculty, in the mind, innate in every human and dedicated to language, that incorporates the basic principles, and what all of us do while learning our mother tongue at a tender age is setting values to these principles based on the data we get by exposure to an unorganized and random set of utterances via interaction with other people.

Second, the theory then generates testable hypotheses, rules and falsifiable predictions about what occurs in a language and hence in all human languages. The data used to test these hypotheses are native speakers’ intuitions on the grammaticality and ungrammaticality of the sentences of their language: what we study is what people tacitly know about their language.We do not study if sentences abide by the rules of grammar but if sentences can be explained with the hypotheses we make. To give an example, we do not study why “He love mangoes” is incorrect; rather, we investigate why “John eats occasionally mangoes” is not a well-formed sentence in English while it is perfectly grammatical in Greek. What prevents the adverb “occasionally” from being placed between the verb “eats” and the noun “mangoes” in English but not in Greek? By examining the native speakers’ tacit knowledge we get a better understanding of how the mind works: “language is a window into the mind”.

Third, these hypotheses change, get refined or are even abandoned when they cannot accommodate the data, and that’s the way we move on in our search for the truth in language learning.

In Linguistics, as in the other sciences, we aim at explaining some data and not everything, making small steps at a time. Many steps have been made since 1957 but we still have a long way to go.  We have a sold path to follow thanks to Chomsky.

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2 Responses to Noam Chomsky- His Contribution to Linguistics

  1. shasha says:

    thanks for you to leave a page for chomsky.
    i’ve got some good information from you.

    • ahmed says:

      Tks a lot sister for your comment, but I’m really confused since I heard that de sessaure, who’s the father of modern linguistics, and I see here with you again. so which is the right one?

      your student.

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