Generative Linguistics

Chomsky's theories represented, and still represent, both a strong break with American structural linguistics and, a basic continuity with ideas traceable back to de Saussure and beyond.

The major changes introduced by Chomsky's theories were:

1. To challenge basic discovery procedure for linguistic research deriving from behavioral assumptions.

2. To reject the belief that language acquisition is habit formation;

3. To include intuitions and semantic information as admissible linguistic data;

4. To center linguistic research on syntax

5. To reject an item-arrangement approach in favor of an item-process approach (e.g., with transformations and the assumption of a deep structure syntactic level);

6. To devise a set of criteria for evaluating competing grammars; and

7. To propose as the goal of linguistic research the search for lingustic universals, the discovery of which could then represent arguments for the biological predispositions that humans appear to have to learn language structure.