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What Is The Road From Behaviourism To Generative Grammar

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The road from behaviourism to generative grammar
The early stages of generative grammar were, like any other part of social science, heavily influenced by behaviourism. The publications of Noam Chomsky, by many called the father of generative grammar, led to a paradigm shift in how we view human languages. From the behaviouristic view that language is a result of stimulus-response, to the idea that all human beings have an innate faculty for language.

Behaviourism as a large was heavily based on Skinner and Watson. Watson (1924) famously claimed that the input was what formed human beings, here quoted in Logue (1978: 76):
“Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random …show more content…

“I think it is no overstatement to say that much of the history of generative grammar since the end of the 1960s boils down to the detailed articulation of a system of general principles/conditions on syntactic processes.” (Boeckx 2006: 46)

Indeed, much of what has happened in generative grammar can be boiled down to more closely defining, and thus understanding, the principles of conditions of syntactic processes. Chomsky (1970) proposed a theory that further limited the phrase structure grammar: x-bar theory. (Boeckx 2006: 53)

“In addition to work on levels of representation and on general principles in syntax, linguists in the 1970s focused more and more on the syntax of languages other than English. Invariably they faced the tension between more and more general principles of Universal Grammar and a bewildering array of variation across the languages of the world. Inevitably, they asked themselves the following question: given what we know about the processes at work in language, how does the child converge on her target language?” (Boeckx 2006:

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