The linguistic philosophy of Noam Chomsky: from the Cartesian tradition to generative grammar

The article reveals the contribution of Noam ^omsky's theory of generative grammar to the linguistic and philosophical knowledge of the twentieth century. It is shown that the revolutionary nature of ^omsky' s contribution lies in the new formulation of problems and in the use of the potential of the formalisation method in solving these problems. The author proves that the model of language proposed by ^omsky allowed transforming the basis of traditionalist structural linguistics. Conceptually significant in the article is a phenomenon Paul Ricoeur described as a "dynamic rule of generation": the dynamic concept of structuring activity comes to replace the "structured inventory" (Ricoeur's term). This allowed Ricoeur to call ^omsky's concept the concept of structure as an ordered dynamism. The stages of the formation of the generative grammar theory are indicated. It is also shown that this evolution reflects the specific features of this theory formed at the beginning of the 21st century. The postulate that the theory of morphological systems (forms of discourse) of Gustave Guillaume should be considered a variety of generative grammar is accepted in the article as the original one. Guillaume showed how a phrase is formed from words in the discourse activity; how the form of discourse, placing a word in the context of the phrase, completes the word; how the inclusion of a word in the context of the phrase creates an opportunity for words and discourses to be correlated with the world; finally, how signs "turn towards the universe" through the categories of discourse. Finally, the conceptualisation of the idea of innatism required such categories as language competence and use, deep structure, surface structure, recursion. Language has a rich constructive capacity which coexists with a limited number of verbal means. The author believes that the concepts "language competence" and "language use" are introduced to substantiate this thesis. The notions of "deep structure" and "surface structure" were introduced to denote syntactic links of the internal phase. Deep structure includes a system of elementary sentences. The grammatical structure of sentences is a product of transformation, based on the rules of deep grammar. It is an innate mechanism. It constitutes the knowledge of the language and the mechanisms of mastering the language. The ability of recursion (the ability to create nested sentences and constructs) is specific to the human language. Generativists explain the ability of a person to create and interpret an infinite number of grammatically correct utterances using a limited set of utterances previously found by the presence of recursive mechanisms: an utterance is created by applying a finite number of innate rules to the already known expressions. Generative grammar gives a formal description of these rules, and this allows us to consider it as a form of formal linguistics.

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