ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with traditional linguistics, whose purpose is to provide a terminology and a classificatory system for talking about languages and looks at the basic questions which Chomsky is concerned with in this side of his work. It shows more positively at linguistics by looking at some questions about language which many of the areas we have excluded from linguistics touch on in passing. The book also looks at some examples of generative grammar. Some people argue that Chomsky is wrong to use the word knowledge to describe what is in the head of a speaker of a language. The book looks at Chomsky's starting-point: his aim of devising an approach to the study of language which can hope to achieve some of the explanatory power and depth of work in the natural sciences, particularly physics.
