| description |
Charlotte Lindenbergh and Jan-Wouter Zwart. 2017. The presentation of linguistic examples in the 1950s: an unheralded change. In Martijn Wieling, Martin Kroon, Gertjan van Noord and Gosse Bouma, eds., From semantics to dialectometry: Festschrift in honor of John Nerbonne, 221-231. London: College Publications. |
| type | Invited Festschrift contribution. |
| ID | 2017a | 162 | DOI | First version January 23, 2014; second version September 15, 2016. |
| origin | This paper grew out of a 2013 paper by Charlotte Lindenbergh for a research master tutorial on the foundations of generative grammar, which led to a joint presentation at the Tabu-dag of June 13, 2013. |
| keywords | history of linguistics; example numbering; transformational generative grammar; transformations; formal linguistics; formal sciences; Chomsky |
| summary | This paper deals with a dramatic change in the presentation of linguistic examples in the linguistics literature of the twentieth century, a change coinciding (not accidentally) with the introduction of transformational generative grammar (TGG) in the 1950s. Our investigation of this change and the circumstances that gave rise to it leads us to reconsider the question of continuity and discontinuity in the history of linguistics in this crucial period, focusing on the question of the audience to which the earliest publications in TGG were directed. We argue that this was an audience of nonlinguists (information theorists and mathematical logicians) and that transformations were introduced by Chomsky, the founder of TGG, as a way to preserve, within the new paradigm of formal grammar theory, established insights of a purely linguistic nature. |
| related |
full text Presentations: Tabu-dag, 06/2013 |
