Syntactic Theory

Until about 1800, almost all linguistics was primarily prescriptive. Traditional grammar (going back hundreds, even thousands of years, to ancient India and ancient Greece) was developed largely in response to the inevitable changing of language, which is always (even today) seen by most people as its deterioration. Prescriptive grammars have always been attempts to codify the `correct' way of talking. Hence, they have concentrated on relatively peripheral aspects of language structure. On the other hand, they have also provided many useful concepts for the sort of grammar we'll be doing. For example, our notion of parts of speech, as well as the most familiar examples (such as noun and verb) comes from the ancient Greeks.

In the early twentieth century, many linguists, following the lead of the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure, turned their attention from the historical (or `diachronic'6) study to the `synchronic'7 analysis of languages { that is, to the characterization of languages at a given point in time. The attention to synchronic studies encouraged the investigation of languages that had no writing systems, which are much harder to study diachronically since there is no record of their earlier forms.

In the United States, these developments led linguists to pay far more attention to the indigenous languages of the Americas. Beginning with the work of the anthropological linguist Franz Boas, American linguistics for the first half of the twentieth century was very much concerned with the immense diversity of languages. The Indo-European languages, which were the focus of most nineteenth-century linguistic research, constitute only a tiny fraction of the approximately five thousand known languages. In broadening this perspective, American linguists put great stress on developing ways to describe languages that would not forcibly impose the structure of a familiar language (such as Latin or English) on something very different; most, though by no means all, of this work emphasized the differences among languages. Some linguists, notably Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, talked about how language could provide insights into how people think. They tended to emphasize alleged differences among the thought patterns of speakers of different languages. For our purposes, their most important claim is that the structure of language can provide insight into human cognitive processes. This idea has wide currency today, and, as we shall see below, it constitutes one of the most interesting motivations for studying syntax.

A third relevant development around mid-century was the decline of behaviorism in the social sciences. Like many other disciplines, linguistics in America at that time was dominated by behaviorist thinking. That is, it was considered unscienti_c to posit mental entities or states to account for human behaviors; everything was supposed to be described in terms of correlations between stimuli and responses. Abstract models of what might be going on inside people's minds were taboo. Around 1950, some psychologists began to question these methodological restrictions, and arguing they made it impossible to explain certain kinds of facts. This set the stage for a serious rethinking of the goals and methods of linguistic research.

Within these general guidelines there is room for many different theories of grammar. Since the 1950s, generative grammarians have explored a wide variety of choices of formalism and theoretical vocabulary.