Linguistic Theories: Formalism, Empiricism, and Chomsky's Insights

Formalism in Language Description

Defining Formalism in Linguistics

Formalism in language description is a tendency to create formal descriptions of language, formalizing its units and levels, and explicitly presenting its general and abstract organization as a code or system.

Form vs. Function in Linguistic Analysis

• In a formalist approach, form is opposed to function, which is understood as the ultimate goal of units and levels of language, serving as an instrument of communication.
• The structuralist and generativist paradigms are both more formalist than functional.
• Pragmatics is more functionalist, as its paradigm is more interested in communication and usage.
• For Generative Grammar (GG), function does not constrain form. Its main focus is not language as a social communication-oriented instrument.

Linguistic Empiricism: Approaches and Methods

Understanding Linguistic Empiricism

Linguistic empiricism is a research practice based on the observation of data and phenomena of linguistic reality.

Descriptive Empiricism in Linguistics

This is a research method based on the description of properties and attributes of language. Structuralism and pragmatics are examples of descriptive approaches.

Explanatory Empiricism in Linguistics

This research method aims to build the procedures and operations of language using an explicit and formalized metalanguage. Generative Grammar is an example of an explanatory approach.

Linguistic Universals and Innate Language Faculty

What Are Linguistic Universals?

Linguistic universals are the abstract properties and principles shared by all languages, which determine the form and interpretation of sentences in a natural language and its potential grammar.

Historical Antecedents of Linguistic Universals

• Port-Royal Grammar (1660)
• Saussure’s universal phonetics
• The Prague School: Trubetzkoy and Jakobson and their phonetic theory

Plato's Problem as Expressed by Bertrand Russell

• “How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?”

Chomsky's Core Questions on Language

• What does linguistic knowledge consist of?
• How is language acquired by children?
• How is language used?

Chomsky's Answers: Innateness and Universals

• Human beings are born with the faculty of language.
• Language is innate to human beings.
• Linguistic Universals are properties linked to the innateness of language.

Chomsky's Concept of Linguistic Creativity

The Innovative Nature of Language Use

When Chomsky posits the tenet that the use of language is innovative, he means that a great amount of a speaker’s utterances are completely new:

• They are not repetitions of what we heard before.
• They are free from external stimuli.
• They are coherent and adequate to the situation.

Chomsky's Remarks on Nominalization (1970)

Lexical Hypothesis and Its Consequences

This work forms the basis for the lexical hypothesis, with two relevant consequences:

1. The endocentric conception of syntactic structures.
2. The structure of the lexicon, with the development of morphology.