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Beginning to a Revolutionary Change
In 1957, during the early career of Chomsky, his first book titled Syntactic Structures was published. It was his first book and also the introduction to the public for what would become a long-term study of linguistics. Written specifically for linguists that described how sentence structures generate "infinite sets of rules within a given language" (Chomsky 1957), meaning grammar assigns structural description to sentences. -
Cognitive Science
Chomsky offered a published review of a book named Verbal Behavior by Burrhus Skinner which sparked many future debates of cognitivism against then-dominant behaviorism. -
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Innate Knowledge of Language
Since the 1960s, Chomsky came up with a revolutionary idea that “we are all born with an innate knowledge of grammar that serves as the basis for all language acquisition” (Dovey 2015). The idea was proposed that everyone was born with fundamental understanding, whether or not certain things needed guidance to learn. He further compared learning language to learning how to walk, which proved in new studies that he may have been correct. -
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Government and Binding
A new theory of syntax that was developed in the 1980s based on the previous research of Chomsky’s transformational grammar. Here are two videos that describe what this new linguistic theory is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiSX3Hi5zaM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6McDsR9YeA
