ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that while Chomsky and his direct followers are the best-known, the most numerous, and probably the most important of researchers and teachers in theoretical linguistics today, they do not in any way stand alone. It discusses tagmemics, systemic grammar, and stratificational linguistics each of these theories has acquired by now a quite considerable body of expository and critical literature. To begin with Chomsky and the developments for which he has been directly or indirectly responsible, one must first realize that during the past thirty years he and his disciples and associates have not been propagating and refining a single variety of linguistic theory or a single set of descriptive and analytical principles. Grammatical rules as such do not constrain the syntactic complexity or the length of sentences or even, in some languages, the morphological complexity and length of words. In 1957 Chomsky's Syntactic structures was first published, effectively introducing what was immediately called transformational or transformational-generative grammar.
