Formalism: Noam Chomsky

Life

Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945.  Zellig Harris, an American scholar touted for discovering structural linguistics (breaking structural parts or levels). Harris introduced Chomsky to Nathan Fine, a Harvard mathematician, and two philosophers, Nelson Goodman, and Nathan Salmon.

Chomsky received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He conducted part of his doctoral research during four years at Harvard University as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his doctoral thesis, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas

Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his Syntactic Structures, a distillation of his Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75), challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar.[61] This approach takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a context-free grammar extended with transformational rules.

The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages.

Chomsky's work in linguistics has had profound implications for modern psychology. For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how children learn language and what, exactly, the ability to use language is.

Formalism

                                                                                                  
The formalism of context-free grammars was developed in the mid-1950s by Noam Chomsky, and also their classification as a special type of formal grammar (which he called phrase-structure grammars)

A context-free grammar provides a simple and mathematically precise mechanism for describing the methods by which phrases in some natural language are built from smaller blocks, capturing the "block structure" of sentences in a natural way. Its simplicity makes the formalism amenable to rigorous mathematical study

In Chomsky's generative grammar framework, the syntax of natural language was described by a context-free rules combined with transformation rules.

A formal grammar (sometimes simply called a grammar) is a set of formation rules for strings in a formal language. The rules describe how to form strings from the language's alphabet that are valid according to the language's syntax. A grammar does not describe the meaning of the strings or what can be done with them in whatever context—only their form. 

Formal language theory, the discipline which studies formal grammars and languages, is a branch of applied mathematics.

The linguistic formalism derived from Chomsky can be characterized by a focus on innate, universal grammar (UG), and a disregard for the role of stimuli.


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The Sapir - Whorf hypothesis

This hypothesis says that a man´s language moulds his perception of reality, or that a world a man inhabits is a linguistic construct, has become associated with the names of Americans Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf.

Sapir and Whorf fully shared the relativism of Boas and his Desctiptivist successors, with its emphasis on the alienness of exotic languages, while never being influenced by the behaviorism of Bloomfield. There was a conflict between the ideas summarized as the Sapir-Whorf htpothesis and the ideas of other Descsriptivists.

Sapir studied languages of the Pacific coasts of North America and took it for granted that if one wants to know how a language is structured for its speakers it is appropriate to ask them. Sapir thought, there was a long- term tendency for that language to modify itself in some particular direction.

Edward Sapir and his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf heirs to a tradition in European thought mediated in all by Franz Boas which development of structuralism.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, as it is usually presented as “Language determines thought”. In the extreme version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may be put as follows:

a)    We are, in all our thinking and forever, “at mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for (our) society”, because we cannot but see and hear and otherwise experience in terms of the categories and distinctions encoded in language.

b)    The categories and the distinctions encoded in one language system are unique to that system and incommensurable with those of other systems.

The weaker version of the hypothesis says that the structure of one´s language influences perception and recall.

All this says that the language of a speaker determines completely the way it conceptualizes, memorize, and classify the reality around him. For example Boas had already made the point that, for instance, where English has the one word snow Eskimo has separate basic roots for snow falling, snow on the ground, drifting snow, and so forth; at this relatively concrete level disparities between the conceptual schemes of different language are familiar.

Another example is the Berlin and Kay who being investigating the color terminologies of twenty languages from widely scattered areas of the world, using native-speakers´ judgments of how to a label various portions of a large standard color chart. Berlin and Kay identify eleven smallish areas of the chart as “universal colors”: red, pink, orange, yellow, brown, green, blue, purple, black, white, grey.  

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American Structuralism: Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield (1887 –1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics  in the United States during 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. He made significant contributions.

Bloomfield's approach to linguistics was characterized by its emphasis on the scientific basis of linguistics, adherence to Behaviorism especially in his later work, and emphasis on formal procedures for the analysis of linguistic data. The influence of Bloomfieldian structural linguistics declined in the late 1950s and 1960s as the theory of Generative Grammar developed by Noam Chomsky came to predominate.

                                                                                                                                    

GLOSSARY

The structuralism: focuses in the structure of a language.

Mentalism and behaviorism: three things are involved:

a) outside speakers

b) inside speakers

c) speech

The phoneme: language must depend upon or habitually and conventionally discriminating some features of sounds and ignoring others’.

Basic and Modified Meaning: the meaning of a morpheme is a sememe, constant, definite, discrete from all other semmemes: order, modulation and phonetic modification. A simple feature of grammatical arrangement is a taxeme; meaningful units of grammatical from are tagmemen  and their meanings are called episemmes.

Order: is the most important in languages

Parts of the Speech: most languages show a smaller number, and in such languages syntactic form-clases tend to appear in phrases rather than words, Chinese is the classic example.

Suggestive Symbols: formulations using parentheses and various kind of brackets.

Dialect Geography: Speech Communities. Both dialect and genetic relationship become clearer on a stimulus-response view of geographic and social contiguity.



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The London School

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