Transformational Grammar as a Theory of Language Acquisition: A Study in the Empirical Conceptual and Methodological Foundations of Contemporary ... Studies in Linguistics, Series Number 10)

by Bruce L. Derwing

The revolution in linguistic thought associated with the name of Professor Noam Chomsky centres on the theory of transformational generation, especially in grammar. This book subjects the main theory and some of its applications to a searching critique. It finds the theory in some places circular, in general descriptively inadequate, but above all aprioristic and dangerously unempirical. Professor Derwing writes as a linguist particularly interested in the psychology of language acquisition, and conscious that the TGG model starts from assumptions about the mind and linguistic universals which dictate the form and the consequences of the argument. They strike Professor Derwing as arbitrary and merely formal, and as contradicting basic scientific mental habits. In brief, Professor Derwing disputes that TGG exemplifies proper empirical scientific inquiry; that something like a TGG is part of the output of normal language acquisition; or that TGG provides a valid heuristic for psychological investigation. He argues therefore for a more experimental approach if we are actually to discover how language is acquired.

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Bruce Derwing is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Alberta, where he taught from 1968 through 1996. His early research focused on the philosophy of linguistics and child language, but most of his career has been devoted to the cross-linguistic experimental investigation of the psychological reality of phonological and morphological units, with a special interest in the role of orthographic knowledge on the perceived segmentation of speech. He has also had a long-standing pedagogical interest in the teaching of Russian phonetics and phonology to non-native learners.