Formal language as a model for natural language in the early chomskyan linguistic

ADRIANA GONZALO

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Argentine- German Workshop: Formality and Universality in the History of Logic and Linguistics; 2010

Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Buenos Aires

Formal language as a model for natural language in the early chomskyan linguistic   Adriana Gonzalo (UNL-CONICET)   Abstract   The work begins with panoramic remarks about the linguistic studies before the emergence of Chomsky’s theory. Then some epistemological considerations are introduced in relation to the general trend in the MIT in the 50th years when the empirical and behaviourist tradition had a great number of followers. I present Chomsky`s first works (1957, 1975) as breaking this tradition. The author exposed as a central task of the linguistic work to construct a scientific theory carrying out a hypothetic construct on the structure and mechanism of language processes, which has to be tested by methods of justification. In the next part I show how Chomsky (1957) represented a revolution for a second reason: “it placed syntactic relations at the centre of langue”. I tried to proof how Chomsky´s trend in the linguistic was hard inspired in the idea of logic as a calculus, and the way of thinking natural languages just in a mirror of logical languages. Finally I intend to give account of this turn to the “logical paradigm” in the linguistic showing how natural language was seen as a set of signs, which are connected by different types of rules (base phrase rules and transformational ones) in order to explain the generation of formal structure, which can receive a semantic interpretation.