Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky.The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be.
The Chomsky hierarchy in the fields of formal language theory, computer science, and linguistics, is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars. A formal grammar describes how to form strings from a language's vocabulary (or alphabet) that are valid according to the language's syntax.
In the sixth chapter titled "On the Goals of Linguistic Theory", Chomsky writes that his "fundamental concern" is "the problem of justification of grammars". [10] He draws parallels between the theory of language and theories in physical sciences. He compares a finite corpus of utterances of a particular language to "observations".
IBM computer scientist John Backus, another Turing Award winner, used some of Chomsky's concepts to help him develop FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level computer programming language. [291] Chomsky's theory of generative grammar has also influenced work in music theory and analysis, such as Fred Lerdahl's and Ray Jackendoff's generative ...
To convert a grammar to Chomsky normal form, a sequence of simple transformations is applied in a certain order; this is described in most textbooks on automata theory. [4]: 87–94 [5] [6] [7] The presentation here follows Hopcroft, Ullman (1979), but is adapted to use the transformation names from Lange, Leiß (2009).
Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles (i.e. abstract rules or grammars) and specific parameters (i.e. markers, switches) that for particular languages are either turned on or off.
The role of genes in language formation has been discussed and studied extensively. Proposing generative grammar, Noam Chomsky argues that language is fully caused by a random genetic mutation, and that linguistics is the study of universal grammar, or the structure in question. [40]
Chomsky first referred to these Hockettian concepts in his 1962 paper The Logical Basis of Linguistic Theory (later published as Current Issues in Linguistic Theory in 1964). In it Chomsky noted that "the difference between observational and descriptive adequacy is related to the distinction drawn by Hockett (1958) between 'surface grammar' and ...