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Linguistics Dept. UC Santa Cruz 1156 High Street Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077
Current
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webling@ling.ucsc.edu © 2008 UC Santa Cruz
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| Foundations of Linguistic Theory Home Ling 125: Foundations of Linguistic Theory This course offers a survey of some of the history and foundational assumptions of generative grammar, and looks also at some of the influence of generative linguistic theorizing on disciplines outside linguistics—notably psychology and philosophy. It begins with an examination of the goals that Noam Chomsky set out for theoretical linguistics when he proposed in 1957 a sharp divergence from the methodological path that the general theoretical study of language had followed during the American structuralist period 1925–1955. It then examines the principal claims about the nature of language that have emerged from the work of Chomsky and those who have worked on similar lines: the notion of a general linguistic theory that attempts to capture the universal features of human language design, the claim that those features are grounded in a species-specific genetic endowment for which general linguistic theory constitutes a reconstruction, the claim that language-learning is fundamentally different from other kinds of learning. Some broader implications for other disciplines are then examined: the downfall of behaviorist theorizing in psychology, the revival of strains of thought emanating from 17th-century rationalism in philosophy, and the birth of processing automata for various sorts of language in in computer science. At each step, the strategy pursued will be to reach as clear an understanding of the Chomskyan position as possible and then to confront that understanding with critiques from various perspectives in the light of a certain experience with modern linguistics as provided by the prerequisite courses.
Prerequisite(s): Ling 113 (Syntax Two)
or Ling 116 (Semantics Two). General Education Code: None
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