Creation Myths of Generative Grammar and the Mathematics of SyntacticStructures
نویسنده
چکیده
Syntactic Structures (Chomsky [6]) is widely believed to have laid the foundations of a cognitive revolution in linguistic science, and to have presented (i) the first use in linguistics of powerful new ideas regarding grammars as generative systems, (ii) a proof that English was not a regular language, (iii) decisive syntactic arguments against contextfree phrase structure grammar description, and (iv) a demonstration of how transformational rules could provide a formal solution to those problems. None of these things are true. This paper offers a retrospective analysis and evaluation.
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