ABSTRACT
Noam Chomsky is at once a brilliant grammarian and an important philosopher of language. As a grammarian, he has had greater influence on our conception of English syntax, both of the nature of syntax and the nature of particular constructions, than any other scholar now living, and continues to display a remarkable ability to discover new problems and new generalisations that his predecessors had entirely failed to notice. As a philosopher of language, he is responsible above all for the belief that linguistics is, in his terms, a branch of cognitive psychology, and that human beings have a genetically inherited faculty of language which is independent of other faculties of the mind. If these contributions were separate, they might well be thought to merit two chapters in an encyclopaedia of this kind. But they are intimately related. Chomsky's philosophy of mind rests directly on a philosophy of grammar, in which the term ‘grammar’ was used, in the 1960s, to refer not simply to a linguist's description of a language, but to the basic knowledge of linguistic structures that every speaker of a language has acquired in infancy. The central issues of linguistic theory are then posed as follows. First, we must ask what grammars are like: what form does a speaker's basic knowledge of a language take? Second, we have to ask how speakers do in fact acquire this knowledge. Chomsky's answer to the second question largely reflects his answer to the first, and both are central to his view of mind in general. The term ‘philosophy of grammar’ will recall the title of a famous work by Otto Jespersen (1924), a scholar with whose interests Chomsky has himself expressed sympathy (1975,1986:21f). The aim of this chapter is to examine the development of his own philosophy of grammar, from its beginning in the 1950s to the form in which we find it now, thirty years after the work which first made his reputation.
