Contemporary Formalist Linguistics
Margaret L. Thomas · 2019
Chapter 3 surveys formalist linguistic theory from the middle of the twentieth century, dominated by Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar. The development of generative grammar passed through at least three stages, from early transformational grammar, which first appeared on the scene in 1957, to the ‘principles and parameters’ model of the 1980s, to the still-emerging Minimalist Program from the early 1990s. Despite striking changes in the organization of a grammar and its apparatus, the emphasis here is on the continuity of generativists’ commitment to formalism. They pursued a maximally economical representation of the knowledge of native speakers, while attending to issues of learnability and cross-linguistic differences—and maintained a principled separation of form from function. The chapter also includes sketches of two non-generativist late twentieth-century linguistic theories: Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar and Lexical-Functional Grammar. Both are thoroughly formalist in conception and design.