Podcast episode 23: Interview with Noam Chomsky on the beginnings of generative grammar

In this interview, we talk to Noam Chomsky about the intellectual environment in which generative grammar emerged.
Download (hiphilangsci.net/wp-content/u...) | Spotify (open.spotify.com/show/37JY0M7...) | Apple Podcasts (podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast...) | Google Podcasts (podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0...)
References for Episode 23
Primary Sources
Bloomfield, Leonard (1933). Language. New York: Henry Holt and Co.
Carnap, Rudolf (1936). ‘Testability and meaning’, Philosophy of Science 3.4: 419-471.
Chomsky, Noam (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Chomsky, Noam (1959). Review of Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner. Language 35.1: 26-58.
Chomsky, Noam (1975). The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chomsky, Noam (1979 [1949]). Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew. New York: Garland.
Goodman, Nelson (1951). The Structure of Appearance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Harris, Zellig S. (1951). Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Harris, Zellig S. (1965). ‘Transformational theory’, Language 41.3: 363-401.
Hockett, Charles F. (1968). The State of the Art. The Hague: Mouton.
Lashley, Karl (1951). ‘The problem of serial order in behavior’, in Lloyd Jeffress (ed.), Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, 112-136. New York: Wiley.
Lenneberg, Eric (1967). Biological Foundations of Language. New York: Wiley.
Miller, George A. (1951). Language and Communication. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Quine, Willard Van Orman (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Shannon, Claude & Warren Weaver (1949), The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. MPI PuRe: 1964 edition (pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2...)
Skinner, Burrhus Frederic (1948). Walden Two. New York: Macmillan.
Skinner, Burrhus Frederic (1957). Verbal Behavior. New York: Appleton Century Crofts.
Secondary Sources
Chomsky, Noam (2021), ‘Linguistics then and now: some personal reflections’, Annual Review of Linguistics 7: 1-11. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-linguistics-081720-111352 (doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lingu...) (open access)
Hiż, Henry and Pierre Swiggers (1990). ‘Bloomfield the logical positivist’, Semiotica 79.3-4: 257-270.
Matthews, Peter H. (1993). Grammatical Theory in the United States: From Bloomfield to Chomsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Newmeyer, Frederick J. (1986 [1980]). Linguistic Theory in America: The first quarter-century of transformational generative grammar. London: Academic Press.
Transcript by Luca Dinu
JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:19] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:23] Our focus in this series now shifts to American linguistics in the middle of the 20th century. [00:29] To help us get our bearings in this environment, we’re joined in this episode by none other than Noam Chomsky. [00:37] So, when you began studying linguistics in 1946, the dominant school in America was that of the Bloomfieldians. [00:47] They were committed to the psychological doctrines of behaviourism, which saw human language as a kind of learned habit, and to a highly empirical approach to analysing languages, which limited itself to describing surface patterns attested in corpora. [01:04] One of the great breakthroughs that you made in introducing generative grammar was to seek explanatorily adequate grammars that abstract away from surface details in order to capture the underlying principles of language as an endowment of the species Homo sapiens. [01:20] So how did you arrive at this position, at odds with the mainstream of linguistics at the time? [01:27]
NC: Well, first, to clarify the facts, I was actually at the University of Pennsylvania. [01:38] The leading figure there was Zellig Harris, a major figure in modern linguistics and a person who I was quite close to, followed him closely. [01:55] He himself was not particularly taken with behaviourism, and he didn’t really… He wasn’t interested in any of the psychological interpretations of what the language faculty is. [02:09] His approach was basically data-oriented, procedures of analysis for any corpus of data. [02:20] He worked out the most sophisticated and detailed procedures which you could, in principle, use to apply to any material to get some structural analysis of it. [02:32] And the question of what all of this meant psychologically just basically didn’t arise; he didn’t take it very seriously. [02:42] ...