ABSTRACT
A source Noam Chomsky roundly repudiates is 'structural linguistics', his chief competitor. His 'discussion' of work in this discipline leads the agenda of Syntactic Structuresand is cited in AT as 'unanswerable' or at least 'for the moment, not challenged', whereupon he presumes that 'the inadequacy' of 'structuralist grammars' 'for natural languages' 'has been established beyond any reasonable doubt'. Chomsky turns away from 'modern linguistics' and cites far earlier sources: Panini, Plato, and both rationalist and romantic philosophers, such as Rene Descartes, Claude Faure Vaugelas, Cesar Chesneau DuMarsais, Denis Diderot, James Beattie, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Chomsky stipulates that a theory of linguistic intuition, a grammatical description, or an operational procedure must be tested for adequacy by measuring it against the tacit knowledge it tries to 'describe'. Chomsky proposes to 'construct a formalized general theory of linguistic structure and to explore its 'foundations', hoping to 'fix in advance for all grammars' the way they are 'related to corpus of sentences'.
