Rationalism and Cognitive Psychology [EN]

In the decade of the 1960s the generative-transformational school of linguistics emerged through the influence of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky was trying to show that human language cannot be scrutinized simply in terms of observable stimuli and responses or the volumes of raw data gathered by field linguists. The generative linguist was interested not only in describing language (achieving the level of descriptive adequacy) but also in arriving at an explanatory level of adequacy in the study of language, that is, a principled basis, independent of any particular language, for the selection of the descriptively adequate grammar of each language. Early seeds of the generative-transformational revolution were planted near the beginning of the twentieth century.