ABSTRACT
Elaborating somewhat on James Peter Thorne's instructive introduction, physicists may summarize the central notion thus: N. Chomsky's programme proposes to gain insight into some features of the mind by studying certain aspects of linguistic intuitions. Much current controversy centres on the choice between two alternative views on the position of semantic rules in a grammar. Chomsky's classical model has them as interpretative, projecting from the meanings of the morphemes and the syntactic form of the deep structure of a sentence to its meanings. Chomsky conjectures that at mathematicians' present level of understanding neither model is strongly enough constrained for the two to be distinguished empirically, that they are notational variants. Many would view the former model to be supported by a finding that there is a universal syntactic base, in Chomsky's sense, languages differing among themselves only in morphemes, some transformational rules, and phonology.
