Chomsky's Saussure
Chomsky's Saussure
This chapter analyses Noam Chomsky's view and interpretation of Ferdinand de Saussure's ideas about linguistics, explaining that there seems to be no indication that Chomsky had ever read or paid any attention to the work of Saussure until 1959 and that the first mention of Saussure in Chomsky's paper was in 1963. It suggests that Chomsky welcomed the ideas of Saussure because he was looking retrospectively for pre-Bloomfieldian champions of mentalism who could be posthumously resurrected as avatars heralding his own approach to linguistic theory. Despite this, Chomsky also expressed his criticism on Sausurre's failure to present lange as a system of generative rules.
Keywords: Noam Chomsky, Ferdinand de Saussure, linguistics, interpretation, mentalism, linguistic theory, lange, generative rules
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
