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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