ABSTRACT
August 1992 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Noam Chomsky’s first international exposure, and there is no doubt that his plenary paper at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in August 1962, held outside Europe for the first time in the history of these congresses and, co-incidentally, on Chomsky’s ‘home turf’, proved to be the most important event in acquainting the linguistic world with the fundamentals of Transformational-Generative Grammar.1 In recognition of the significance of this momentous event, Frederick J.Newmeyer, the well-known writer on Chomskyan linguistics, organized a panel discussion at the Fifteenth International Congress of Linguists, held in Quebec City in August 1992, devoted to a retrospective appraisal of this historic date and an evaluation of the evolution of Chomsky’s research program outlined in his 1962 paper to the present (cf. Newmeyer 1996:66-79).2 This chapter, by contrast, constitutes a much more modest contribution to the development of American linguistics, namely, an investigation of the European sources of Chomsky’s linguistic inspiration, in particular his references to the Cours de linguistique générale which also made their first public appearance in this 1962 plenary address.
