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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.
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.
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 theory of tonal music. [ 293 ] [ 294 ] [ 295 ] Chomsky is among the most cited authors living or dead.
In Chomsky's opinion, in order for a linguistic theory to be justified on "internal grounds" and to achieve "explanatory adequacy", it has to show how a child's brain, when exposed to primary linguistic data, uses special innate abilities or strategies (described as a set of principles called "Universal Grammar") and selects the correct grammar ...
It is suggested that the system of levels proposed by Chomsky in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax has its antecedents in the works of Descartes, Kant, Carnap, Quine, and others. Certainly the criterion of adequacy found in rationalism, specifically, rational empiricism, bear some resemblance to Chomsky's formulation.
Syntactic Structures is an important work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957.A short monograph of about a hundred pages, it is recognized as one of the most significant and influential linguistic studies of the 20th century.
Chomsky suggests that humans are not exposed to all structures of their language, yet they fully achieve knowledge of these structures. Linguistic nativism is the theory that humans are born with some knowledge of language. One acquires a language not entirely through experience.
In linguistics, X-bar theory is a model of phrase-structure grammar and a theory of syntactic category formation [1] that was first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1970 [2] reformulating the ideas of Zellig Harris (1951 [3]), and further developed by Ray Jackendoff (1974, [4] 1977a, [5] 1977b [6]), along the lines of the theory of generative grammar put forth in the 1950s by Chomsky.