1

Hassan II University of Casablanca Moroccan American Studies

Faculty of Letters and Humanities Ben Msik, Master Program
Department of English Survey of Linguistics

Essay:

Noam Chomsky: A New

Paradigm in Modern Linguistics
Abderrahim Chalfaouat & Rachid Elaassri (2010)

Introduction:

Discussing twentieth century linguistics necessarily is to include the paradigmatic

contribution of Noam Chomsky. As one of the most influential thinkers of our age, the extent to
which he has revolutionized the domain of linguistics has made of him the most cited writer in the
humanities nowadays. He has also inaugurated change in other disciplines and fields including
political theory, philosophy, cognitive psychology and even mathematics. His prolific career and
circularity of thought have made it difficult for writers to collect in one accessible volume on
Chomsky’s diverse, though systematic and inter-connected, productions that include over eighty
books, hundreds of articles, thousands of speeches and scores of letters. Chomsky is well-aware of
his own contribution, position, influence and difference. That is why he says: “it takes a big ego to
withstand the fact that you’re saying something different from everyone else.”
This essay is a follow-up to a presentation that surveys the work of Chomsky as a landmark
of modern linguistics. Difficult and challenging as an endeavor, it adumbrates the Chomskyan
tradition and highlights major aspects of his intellectual and linguistic position within the ongoing
stream of human thought, linguistics in particular. Thus, this essay firstly presents a short coverage
of the historical context in which Chomsky has lived, influenced and been influenced by. The
historical background highlights the political, economic and intellectual situation in the second half
of the twentieth century up until now. Then, focus shifts towards Chomsky himself, his biography
and political views with which he has been an active influencer, commentator, critic and writer on
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approximately every aspect of US hegemony especially in foreign policy. To further narrow the
scope of this essay, a sketch is provided on Behaviorism as the linguistic paradigm that preceded
Chomsky. Furthermore, Chomskyan groundbreaking steps in linguistics and its sub-disciplines is
accounted for especially his review of Skinner’s notion of verbal behavior, his major work on
language and mind with its different intersections, his transformational generative grammar with
more stress on generative phonology, added to his influence on cognitive psychology. The paper
ends up with criticism on Chomsky.

Historical Background
The twentieth century was a period of continuous strife whereby the US played a key role and
gradually established its position as a superpower. Problems were mainly political. Equally,
economic, scientific and cultural paradigmatic changes took place. Major events punctuated the first
half of the twentieth century chiefly World War One (1914-1918), the Bolshevist Revolution
(1917), the fall of the Ottoman Empire (1924), the economic depression (1929) and the continuation
of European invasions to different parts of the world. However, the period that is more pertinent to
the life of Chomsky, and to this essay by consequence, is the second half of the century. The biggest
event in the middle of the century, historians agree, is the Second World War whose aftermath still
looms large until today. Some of its lasting results include the end of Nazism and Fascism. In
addition, the US first used mass destruction weapons by throwing two successive nuclear bombs on
Japanese Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This demarcating event shocked and awed Japan –or the whole
world in fact- and declared the United States of America a key power, if not a superpower, in terms
of weaponry and its utilization to shape international affairs. The United Nations soon saw light as a
descendant of the League of Nations. Towards the end of the 1940s NATO was established, the
Soviet Union owned a nuclear bomb, (Israel) was founded and communism spread in South
America and China. The 1950s witnessed the beginning of the Cold War between the capitalist bloc
lead by the US and the communist one lead by the USSR. The facets of this war have been multiple,
combining arms race, media animosity, acquisition of more allies, the overutilization of monetary
aid and the ever-increasing space invasion amplified by founding the NASA. This bipolarity
resulted also in direct military hostilities in areas where the Soviet Union encouraged revolutionary
movements while the United States tried to suppress leftism. Examples include the Korean War, the
Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet War in Afghanistan and support to Zionism in
occupied Palestine. From that time to the end of the twentieth century, several upheavals took place
in the global scene. Advances in spacecrafts and cyberspace have been massive. After the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1990 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, international policy shifted
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from the Cold War to the Middle East Cold War fueled by the 1973 Oil Crisis, the Iranian Islamic
Revolution, the rise of neo-conservatism in the US, the influence of the AIPAC and international
corporations on the American foreign policy and Samuel Huntington’s ideas on the clash of
civilizations in the era of American unipolarism. All these events without a doubt have casted
shadows on Chomsky’s life, thought, activism and overall contribution to the history of ideas.

Chomsky’s Biography and Political Views

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928 in Philadelphia. His parents were
William Chomsky, a Hebrew scholar, and Elsie Simonofsky, a writer of children stories. The
influence of the academic career and Jewish origin of his family influenced him. From age two, he
spent ten years in a progressive Deweyite school in his city of birth, where there was a congenial
emphasis on individual creativity. While still in high school, he proofread the manuscript of his
father's edition of a medieval Hebrew grammar. He attended the University of Pennsylvania where
he met Zellig Harris, one of his key mentors. Though Chomsky came from a background of
biology, Harris’ political views attracted his attention to linguistics and later to generative grammar.
In 1949, he graduated with a BA. His thesis was about Modern Hebrew. In the same year, he
entered graduate school and married Carol Schatz, a linguist and specialist in educational
technology. In 1951, he got his MA in linguistics, right after which he became a member of the
Society of Fellows at Harvard. He moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in
1955 after the completion of his PhD. In 1961, he was promoted to the position of full professor.
His prolific career started with Syntactic Structures (1957) that gave birth to a whole
reconsideration of language from a learned behavior that the brain as a blank slate acquires through
habit formation to a system of rules innate in the mind. His writing on linguistics continued with
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Topics in the
Theory of Generative Grammar (1966), Cartesian Linguistics (1966), Language and the Mind
(1967), and, with Morris Halle, Sound Patterns of English (1968).
Chomsky has been influenced by a large variety of thinkers, philosophers, politicians and
linguists. His political awareness, criticism and enthusiasm started as early as age ten when he
wrote an editorial for his school newspaper deploring the growth of fascism in Spain. He has been
repeatedly jailed for political leftist activism especially for his stiff opposition to the different fronts
of the Cold War. He strongly protested against the Vietnam War, delivering talks and giving a
whole course. In line with this, he disclosed the CIA scams to topple down the Castro regime in
Cuba, particularly the attacks on fishing boats, embassies, Cuban offices overseas, and the bombing
of a Cuban airliner, killing all seventy-three passengers. Most of these interventions were allegedly
masterminded by Luis Posada and Orlando Bosch. The Middle East Cold War and the American
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perpetual financial, military, media and veto support to the atrocities of (Israel) have received equal
Chomskyan gadfly opposition. He had supported Zionism at the beginning, spent six weeks in 1953
in a kibbutz but the experience metamorphosed his opinion radically. Generally, a stepping stone
between his linguistic and political ideas is Cartesian common sense, or allowing the voice of the
common man to come further and shake off the manipulation of the intelligentsia. In this respect,
Chomsky describes his own experience with common sense through the following example:
...in my own professional work I have touched on a variety of different fields. I've
done work in mathematical linguistics, for example, without any professional
credentials in mathematics; in this subject I am completely self-taught, and not
very well taught. But I've often been invited by universities to speak on
mathematical linguistics at mathematics seminars and colloquia. No one has ever
asked me whether I have the appropriate credentials to speak on these subjects1.
Linguistic Background
Before the 1960s, the structuralism was very dominant. It was simply descriptive of the
different levels of production, namely: phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. It did not
provide any model or frame work for understanding how actual learning takes place. In late 1950s,
Skinner constructed his cognitive learning model, behaviorism, which correlates with the notion.
Stimulus → response→ reinforcement and habit formation
According to Skinner, children learn the language by imitating and repeating, while the mind
is a blank slate, or tabula rasa, at birth. There is nothing innate in it. All learning is nurtured in
society. Linguistic competence results from habit formation and classical conditioning.

Chomsky’s Revolution: Critique to Skinner’s ‘Verbal Behavior’

To understand why Chomsky's theory was revolutionary, a glimpse of the theory he shattered
is required. Behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner had argued that children learn language by
imitating adults. Skinner also pinpointed that children learn meaning and grammar when adults
reinforce them for saying things that are meaningful and grammatically correct. For example, a
toddler says, "Ball!" and his parent hands him a ball.
Chomsky pointed out two problems with the behavioral explanation of language learning.
First, children begin speaking in a way that does not directly imitate adults. In fact, they utter things
adults never say. For example, little Sara might say, "Daddy doll"— a word combination she had
never heard before. Such ungrammatical, novel utterance suggested to Chomsky that something
more than imitation was going on.

1
Language and Responsibility, Pantheon, 1977. http://www.chomsky.info/books/responsibility01.htm
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Chomsky identified a second problem with behaviorism. Children are not reprimanded for
uttering ungrammatical sentences. Adults rarely correct children's speech, much of which is
superficially ungrammatical. For example, young children routinely over-generalize grammatical
rules. The sentence "I touched the apple" is grammatically correct and shows that kids have
correctly applied the usual "-ed" ending to form the past tense of the verb "touch". However, when a
kid says "I taked the apple," he/she is over-generalizing this common rule. Of course, he/she will
eventually learn to say, "I took the apple," but the fact that he/she first says "I taked …... " —
especially having never heard an adult saying that— convinced Chomsky that imitation did not
explain language acquisition.
Furthermore, Chomsky delved into the production of unexpected language forms. The most
famous sentence in his Syntactic Structures is "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". Although this
sentence does not make sense, any adult can tell that it is grammatically correct. Chomsky used this
sentence to demonstrate three things at odds with behavioral theory. First, a sentence can be
grammatical without having any meaning. An utterance may respect language rules but violate
felicity conditions and the semantic principles of intelligibility. Therefore, language speakers must
not learn grammar based on what words mean, but rather on the contexts that give them meaning.
Second, we can tell the difference between a grammatical sentence and an ungrammatical one
without ever having heard a given utterance before. While interacting with one another, speakers
enjoy the ability to generate new forms and create usages endlessly, while listeners or receivers
enjoy the ability to tell the grammaticality of the given utterance despite being new or innovative.
Thus, speakers must not learn grammar based on their familiarity or experience with specific
sentences. Third, we can produce and understand brand new sentences that no one has ever said
before. Even when an interlocutor innovatively resorts to figurative speech, the receiver comes to
grips with the interaction, depending on familiarity with language as a whole, not necessarily with
specific utterances or sentences. Therefore, humans must not learn language based solely on
imitation. In brief, the ability to speak is not learned or taught through exposure to external stimuli,
i.e. the people around us. Language acquisition and learning happen because it is a pre-designed
feature in line with other bodily functions. For instance, all humans have the ability to see and hear.
We do not learn to see or hear in the sense that we are trained or conditioned to do this. The
development of our sight and hearing capacities is simply a natural, unconscious process. We take
their presence for granted. For Chomsky, the same principle holds true for first language learning.
Notably, Chomsky stressed the abstract level of language learning. Even though detractors
take issue with that feature, Chomsky is interested in language as a mental phenomenon, not in
language as a tangible vehicle of use. Famously, he distinguished between competence, the
knowledge of language, and performance, language as used in concrete situations of use. This goes
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much further than recognizing the difference between what we know and what we say. The
relationship between competence and performance is unequal since competence underlies
performance while performance is not a reliable guide to competence. For Chomsky, only
competence is worthy of scientific study and can bring meaningful insights into the ways humans
construct grammars.

Language and Mind

Another major Chomskyan contribution to linguistics was the idea of the Language
Acquisition Device. L.A.D is a specific mental function for learning language. It is an innate
biological capacity within human beings just like learning to walk. It plays two roles in Chomskyan
theorisation:
1. It accounts for the striking similarities among human languages, such as the similarity in
using relative clause constructions between English, French and Arabic.
A. English: a- The man that I saw was your brother
b- I read the book that you read.
B. French: a- L’homme que j’ai vu était ton frère.
b- J’ai lu le livre que tu as lu.
C. Arabic: a- r-raʒulu l-ladi: ra?eit kan axuk.
b- 9ara?to lkita:b l-ladi: 9ara?ta.
2. It accounts for the speed, ease and regularity with which children learn their first language.
That is, if the sequence order is the same for all children, it is then quite normal to speak about
language universals. Human languages exhibit remarkable similarities or principles. These patterns
are called universals. We can find these similarities at many linguistic levels.
1. Phonological universals: Consonants, for example, are distinguished according to the
location of their production, or the various organs of the vocal tract. With the help of this detailed
information, we can now refer to every consonant by its location and manner of articulation. [f], for
example, is a voiceless, labiodental fricative.
2. Syntactic universals: In addition to the example of subordinate clause formation, most of
existing languages have verbs, nouns, adjectives and pronouns.
3. Semantic universals: One semantic universal regards our notion of color. There exist eleven
basic color terms: black, white, red, green, blue, yellow, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey.
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Thus, Chomsky proved language to be a rule governed

system. We may need to look at examples showing that Grammar is a set
language speakers often behave as if their language is rule- of rules that
governed. have two tasks:
• The thought of those poor children were really … sentences.
WAS really...bothering me.
from ungrammatical
Separating grammatical
• Even though they told me to, I didn’t sit down
and wasn’t quit…Was quite …I mean I didn’t sit Providing a description
down and I wasn’t quite. each of the grammatical
sentences, stating how
• Ze pound are worthless = the pound is worthless. they should be
The speakers who are ready to correct themselves and pronounced and what
they mean.
others give evidence that there is a right and wrong way of
saying things. This assumption that speakers know the grammar of a language is a claim that these
grammars are psychologically real. The question that is to be raised here is: How do we manage to
know this knowledge of language? In other words, claiming that language is rule-governed system
is like claiming that language is definable in terms of grammar.
For Chomsky, native speaker intuition becomes a valid factor in determining data. Linguistic
knowledge of language lies well beyond the level of consciousness. One way of investigating this
knowledge is to ask language speakers indirectly for their judgments about sentences of their own
language. Ask them, for example, about the grammaticality or ungrammaticality of certain
sentences. There are some difficulties in deciding on how much reliance should be put on speakers’
intuitions.
e.g.: a- I like Indians without reservations.
b- I have no reservations in my liking for Indians.
c- I like Indians who don’t live in reservations.
This is to argue that a certain distinction should be made between the speaker’s perceptual or
understanding abilities (performance) and his actual knowledge of the language performance. These
two key concepts are defined below:
“Competence is knowledge of language. That part of our knowledge which is
exclusively linguistic. It includes knowledge of the vocabulary, of phonology, of syntax, and of
semantics. The part of such knowledge which is different from language to language is learnt; the
part that which is universal is innate.”
“Performance is the use of language in speaking and understanding utterances is
linguistic performance. Performance is dependent on one’s linguistic knowledge (competence) and
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in part on non-linguistic knowledge of an encyclopedia or cultural kind, as well as on extraneous

factors as mood, tiredness and so on.
The distinction between performance and competence (grammaticality and
acceptability) is a distinction between sentence and utterance.
a. Sentences are abstract objects which are not tied to a particular context, speaker or time of
utterance. They are tied to a particular grammar.
b. Utterances are datable events, tied to a particular speaker, occasions and context.
There are utterances that can never be grammatical, but are still acceptable. e.g.
• John’s being a real idiot-I suppose cela va sans dire-kolshi 3rafha.
On the other hand, some grammatical sentences can never be realized as fully acceptable
utterances because of their semantic, syntactic or phonological content. e.g.:
1. We finally sent Edinburgh man, for for four Forfar men to go would have seemed like
favoritism.
2. If because when Mary came in John left Harry cried, I’d be surprised.
3. The colorless green idea sleeps calmly in my head.

Transformational Generative Grammar

Building on his criticism to Neo-grammarians’ theoretical approach to data collection and analysis,
Chomsky revisited its assumptions and expressed the inadequacy of corpora for empirical study.
Thus, for Chomsky a linguistic theory explains rather than only describes grammars. To explain and
describe linguistic competence a theory is to be:
Observationally adequate: it accounts for all the observed (corpus/performance) data.
Descriptively adequate: it accounts for observations, acceptability judgments (competence-
intuition-deep structure), and generalizations; and
Explanatorily adequate: it accounts for the interpretation of the findings of observations,
acceptability and language acquisition.
Adopting this paradigm, a grammar generates all and only the grammatical sentences of a
language. To generate is to predict or specify precisely what the possible sentences of the language
are. Accordingly, the grammar is so designed in the mind that by following its rules and
conventions we can produce all or any of the possible sentences of the language. Thus, grammar for
Chomsky is able to generate sentences such as:
 He is waiting for the bus.
 but not * waiting he is for the bus, or * He the bus is waiting for.
Furthermore, Chomskyan theory brought about novel definitions to terms previously used by
his predecessors. For him, a sentence is a hierarchically organized structure of words that maps
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sound to meaning and vice versa, grammar is a set of rules or a cognitive structure forming the part
of the mind that generates and understands language while syntax is the scientific study of sentence
structure or the psychological, cognitive sentence structure in the mind. Sentences consist of
structured words.
Within the scope of generative grammar, there is an apparent concern with potential
utterances that stem from the language structure in the mind. The deep structure or mental grammar
indicates competence while the surface structure or verbal representation deals with performance.
However, between the two levels, a number of abstract transformations happen to allow an infinite
number of sentences. With parallel importance and depth, Chomskyan generative phonology, as
part of his Universal Grammar, has made a major contribution to linguistics since the publication of
The Sound Pattern of English (1968) jointly with Morris Halle. The central argument of the book is
that human linguistic sounds are systematic, abstract, and, above all, unique to language as a
species-specific phenomenon. It is an extension and elaboration of Chomsky’s review of Jakobson
and Halle’s Fundamentals of Language (1956). On the one hand, they all agree on using a limited
number of universal distinctive features to stand for the sound systems of all languages, assigning
segments, not sounds, to the same phoneme in free variation and extending phonological theory to
explain language acquisition, disorders, and other features of linguistic behavior. Yet, Chomsky’s
distinctive addition occurred when he advanced the empirical necessity for explicitness and
preciseness of Jakobson and Halle’s proposals coupled with a call for more simplicity, more
abstractness and less strictness of distinctive features to phonetics. Nevertheless, most revolutionary
of all is the claim that phonology is a rule-governed system that allows the infinite production of
predictable sound patterns in addition to the differentiation between the phonetic and phonemic
levels.

Chomsky and Cognitive Psychology

Chomskyan influence on cognitive psychology is equally profound. By focusing on syntax
and rules, Chomsky was able to lay the groundwork for an explanation of the most distinctive
aspect of human language: its creativity. Through Chomskyan theories, a bridge between linguistics
and psychology became possible and a window was opened into the human mind through the study
of language. As early as the publication of Syntactic Structures (1957), Chomsky considered
linguistics as a sub-branch of cognitive psychology since this discipline deals with internal mental
processes that can be explained in terms of rules. Being the combination of perceiving, learning,
remembering, thinking, reasoning, and understanding as mental abilities, human cognition intersects
greatly with language competence or mental structure. A major notion that Chomsky came up with
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is the “psychological reality” of language. The mental grammars people have in their minds vividly
interact with other capacities like memory, vision, moral judgment and creativity. That is why he
argues “people who suffer damage to their heads often lose their language in whole or in part”
(Smith, 2004). Therefore, three main domains of interaction between language and mind are
brought under the spotlight with Chomskyan ideas, namely language processing, language
acquisition by the child, and language loss in cases of pathology. He shifted focus from putting
much emphasis on language as a social and political construct to the psychological notion of
language as the knowledge of individuals. To be able to display the psychological reality of
grammar, its sentence well-formedness of acceptable generations and ill-formedness of wrong ones,
Chomsky considered native speaker intuition as the main source for data.
Criticism to Chomsky
Even with regard to criticizing Chomskyan ideas and ideals, he seems to strike his opponents.
Another noteworthy feature of Chomsky’s intellectual vigor is revealed in his repeated revision of
his own inventions. Chomsky seems the first critic to Chomsky. His claims were subject to many
vicissitudes, denoting his circularity of thought. He still maintains many of the ideas he presented in
Syntactic Structures, though some of them in reshaped versions but in other time he would cling to
his claims and force them on data to please the theory. In addition, the idea of deep-surface level
and abstractness require more preciseness about the degree to which a transformation is abstract. In
other words, sometimes the deep structure is far from the surface structure since the amount of
abstractness is not always pre-determined. Furthermore, sociolinguists have levelled much criticism
at Chomsky to the extent that Dell Hymes does not recognize Chomskyan contribution as a
revolution because generative grammar notions were initiated by Zellig Harris (Newmeyer, 1986).
They also revisited linguistic competence as not only a matter of intuition and LAD but also the
simultaneous acquisition of social, cultural and pragmatic competences with language. Dell Hymes
(1971) says that “there are rules of use without which rules of grammar are useless.” Children do
not acquire language per se. They also unconsciously acquire a number of other rules about when,
where, how, to whom and why one speaks. Different aspects of language have variations that
escape a unifying set of rules. The existence of such variations makes it difficult if not impossible to
defend a view of a language as a set of publicly available well-formed modus operandi. Besides, the
fact that intuitions are variable or sometimes unclear is itself in need of explanation, as many critics
say, and numerous questions and objections have been raised in this respect. For instance, as an
inherent idea within the framework of intuition, knowledge of language before acquisition or
learning was heavily criticized. Critics withhold that acquisition or learning are necessary for later
language production. Thus, the pre-existence of a LAD acquires its validity from exposition to
language and the other way round (Smith, 2004). Concerning his political view and anarchist
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criticism to the internal and foreign policies of American administrations, he is criticized for being
always on the opposite side no matter what the government does without suggesting alternatives.

Conclusion

To conclude with, an attempt has been made to survey the Chomskyan contribution to the
development of linguistics and human thought in general. Both his life and the influential trends
that marked the context in which he has lived in have been briefly presented. Parts of his vast
production via which he has affected and actually revolutionized linguistics and other sub-
disciplines have been selected. Whatever the selection is, there will always be need for more study
and investigation of his prolific career, a fact that is admitted by his proponents and opponents
alike. Chomsky’s continuous writing and political opposition have made of him in many respects a
landmark in modern thought and a dissident intellectual to the extent that some people think there
are two Chomskys not just one. Though critics have failed to recognize the system that links his
ideas and makes them operate, his interest in biology, linguistics and politics all have a common
terrain on which they intersect: focus on Cartesian common sense, focus on the common man and
defending the marginalized. Yet, his ongoing self-revision and reception of criticism make a deeper
account of the contribution of sociolinguists, psycholinguists and the interaction between the two a
necessity to better look at the history of ideas as a continuum of epistemologically inter-critical but
never utterly contradictory ideas, theories, approaches and contributions.

Bibliography

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Language and Linguistics. Smolinski, F. (1986). Washington, D.C.
Deneen, F. P. (1967). An Introduction to General Linguistics. Washington, D.C: Georgetown
University Press.
Der Hulst, H V. “On the Question of Linguistic Universals”. The Linguistic Review 25
(2008), 1–34
Hymes, D. (1971). On communicative competence. In Pride, J. & J. Holmes (eds.),
Sociolinguistics, (pp. 269-293). London: Penguin.
Karlsson, F. “Early generative linguistics and empirical methodology”. In Merja Kytö and
Anke Lüdeling, eds., Handbook on Corpus Linguistics. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin & New York,
2007
Neil, S, Dreidre, W. (1990). Modern Linguistics: the results of Chomsky’s Revolution.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Pelican Books.
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Newmeyer, F. (1986). Linguistic Theory in America. Orlando: Academic Press.

Newmeyer, F. “Has There Been a 'Chomskyan Revolution' in Linguistics?” Language, Vol.
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MCGILVRAY, J. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky. Cambridge : CUP.
Smith, N. (2004). Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals. New York: CUP.
http://www.uni-kassel.de/fb8/misc/lfb/html/text/2frame.htm
www.chomsky.info