On The Significance Of Chomsky’s Generative Grammar

Noam Chomsky (1928-), American linguist and philosopher, He is the founder of convert-generative grammar. In1957, Syntactic Structure, a landmark book, was publication.The book is extension of his doctoral thesis " transformation analysis". In his book, he put forward a new kind of language analysis method-convert generative grammar, completely dismissed the research method of structuralism which is popular in Europe and the United States, It quickly set off the "Chomsky revolution". The revolution’s performance is not only in the aspect of linguistics, it also affected the research and development of philosophy, psychology and other scientific. This paper will try to discussed philosophy, linguistics and psychology meaning of generative grammar based on introducing the background of generative grammar, the full text is divided into the following several parts:The first part, We will mainly introduced the background of Chomsky generative grammar. Generative grammar is on the basis of the criticism of the traditional structuralism, on which he criticizes the empiricism and behaviorism,which are the philosophy foundation and psychology basis of structuralism, then proposed the view of language of rationalism and psychological.The second part, this part mainly discusses the generative grammar on the impact of the philosophy of language. Rationalism is the philosophical basis of generative grammar, it critically inherited the Descartes’s theory of "connate Ideas"; Chomsky proposed the linguistics research goal, He also successfully answered a lot of long plagued linguist’s philosophy of languageThe third part, We first briefly introduces the origin and the research methods of structuralism, then points out that the theory origin of generative grammar; Finally summarize the linguistic meaning of generative grammar, namely propose universal grammar、think that the research goal of linguistic is explain language, not description of language, use the method of "logical deduction " and propose the "innate ability" of language learningThe fourth part, Chomsky devoid of behaviorism, and then choose the psychology as his basis of theory of linguistics.at the same time, the linguistic study of rationalism and psychology inevitably leads to the analysis of the innate linguistic competence, which is indispensable to the study of mind and cognition.