Word: grammars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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BERNSTEIN CONTINUES his search for universality with a discussion of transformational grammar, a field which has become the dominant area of study of American linguistics in the ten years since it sprang fully-clothed from the brow of Noam Chomsky. Contemporary linguistics, focusing on syntax, aims at uncovering the structures underlying language. And this is the source of the universality that Bernstein finds so attractive--beneath their surface differences, Chomsky believes, languages are organized on a few simple and universal principles...
Traditional phrase structure grammar analyzed sentences independent of their relation to other sentences: for example, a passive sentence like "Max was crushed by the safe" would be parsed into subject-verb-prepositional phrase. Chomsky's contribution was to recognize that the same, easily described relationship between that sentence and its active counterpart, "The safe crushed Max," exists between countless other pairs of sentences. He conceived of "transformations" as simple devices to describe the relations between simple sentences like "The safe crushed Max" and complex ones like "Max was crushed by the safe," "What the safe did was crush...
Chomsky also believed that features of transformational theory that were found in every language--linguistics universals--would necessarily be innate, biological structures. Again, in the context of contemporary linguistic theory this is an eccentric view, but it is the view Bernstein has grabbed onto--he sees transformational grammar as a "subconscious process," innate and not learned...
...Your grammar fails," the Eliot Pronounced with Bacchic glee...
Paradise Lost's second major flaw is Rothschild's writing style. While the book is often intelligible, barrages of jumbled sentences and creative grammar make the reader question her very analytical ability. ("From the mid 1910s, sustained by national machine fever, the auto investment boom swerved higher and higher.") Unfortunately, she is not alone in this regard. Nader's reports are notoriously unreadable, and many of today's most valuable contributions to the field of corporate responsibility are disguised in language which can only be intended to impress the reader by confusing him. It is more than annoying that some...