Chomskyan linguistics

Before Chomsky, linguistics tended to be a taxonomic enterprise, involving collecting a body of data (utterances) from the external world and classifying it without reference to its source, the human mind; it was a kind of verbal botany, as Searle has put it. Since Chomsky, linguists have thought of themselves as investigating mental representations and rules, and thus as engaged in a branch of theoretical cognitive psychology. Chomsky himself recently characterized the study of generative grammar as having effected a shift of focus in language study from E-language (=externalized language) to I-language (=internalized language), that is, ‘from behaviour or the products of behaviour to states of the mind/brain that enter into behaviour’ (Chomsky 1986: 3). The mentalist picture of language is now a familiar one and I shall do no more here than sketch those of its basic contours which have implications for work on cognitive systems in general:

1. The interesting questions in studying language concern the nature of our knowledge of language, how we come to have this knowledge, and how we put this knowledge to use.

2. These questions are to be approached within a general view of the mind as a system of computational principles forming and transforming representations; linguistic knowledge is a set of such principles and putting that knowledge to use involves the interaction of these principles with other systems of mental representation and computation. The characterization of these systems is to be given formally and explicitly in such a way that it involves no appeal to unanalyzed intelligence or intuitions of the subject.