ABSTRACT
Three linguistic works written in this century before 1950 are generally regarded as presenting ‘generative’ analyses of the data that they treat.1
They are, in chronological order of appearance, Leonard Bloomfield’s ‘Menomini morphophonemics’ (Bloomfield 1939); Roman Jakobson’s ‘Russian conjugation’ (Jakobson 1948); and Noam Chomsky’s undergraduate honours essay, ‘Morphophonemics of modern Hebrew’ (Chomsky 1949). Since Chomsky’s essay contained many of the principal ingredients of the theory that would exert a major influence in the field in the coming years, it is natural to enquire to what extent its ideas drew directly from the Bloomfield and Jakobson papers that preceded it.
