Chomsky & Sibawaihi - What Connections? E-Book

El Mouatamid Ben Rochd

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 54

Beschreibung

THE BOOK THIS BOOK IS A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CHOMSKY'S TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE GRAMMAR THAT OWED HIM ALL HIS FAME AND PRESTIGE IN THE 60S AND 8th CENTURY SIBAWAIHIS ARABIC ALKITAB. THE TWO SEEM STRANGELY SIMILAR IN MANY RESPECTS. THIS BOOK RAISES THE QUESTION: IS IT A NATURAL CHRONOLOGICAL "DEVELOPMENT", "PLAGIARISM" OR SIMPLY "ACCIDENT"?

Leseprobe

Chomsky & Sibawaihi - What Connections?

Pages de titrePREFACECHOMSKYSIBAWAIHIGLOSSARYCONCLUSIONBIBLIOGRAPHYCopyright

THE BOOK

“Transformation” [=>] is the notion that made all the fame and prestige of famous American linguist Noam Avram Chomsky from the early 60’s onwards. Chomsky explained, in a very elegant way, the relationship between different types of sentences. It was a great innovation of the 20thc. But one day, I heard “transformation” uttered by a scholar of traditional Arabic grammar, who had never heard about Chomsky. “Where was the connection?” I wondered. That was the enigma that kept turning my mind for years. This book will raise the issue: was it a “development”, “plagiarism” or simply an “accident” ?

THE AUTHOR

The author holds a BA in American Civilization (Fez 1978), an MA in French linguistics (York 1982) and a PhD in Arabic linguistics (Dublin 1990). He has produced many publications on different subjects and has given talks and lectures in many countries. He spent one academic year in the Linguistic Department of the University of Washington, in which colleagues have much appreciated the diversity of his competences. “Dr. Ben Rochd is qualified to teach Arabic and many areas of linguistics: especially introduction to linguistics, syntax and history of linguistics. I met Dr. Ben Rochd personally and find him very knowledgeable, articulate and totally fluent in English.” (Fritz. Newmeyer)

El Mouatamid Ben Rochd

Chomsky & Sibawaihi -

What Connections?

BOD

To Ash-Cat

Contents

PREFACE

SIBAWAIHI

CHOMSKY

CONCLUSION

GLOSSARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PREFACE

“Transformation” is the notion that made all the “fame and name” of famous American linguist Noam Avram Chomsky from the early 60’s onwards. Chomsky explained in a very elegant way the relationship between different types of sentences such as passive (The ball was hit by the boy), raising (John is easy to please) Equi-NP-deletion (John is eager to please), etc.[see appendix] as well as their UG counterparts.

I was one of Chomsky’s million fans throughout the world for his amazing personality, which was shown on TV several times, (Radford 1981) and his “transformational” theory of language; almost an ideology. I am still an admirer of his enormous endeavour in several fields and his hundred books and articles. He has further been “the champion” of many causes throughout the world.

But, one day my old father pronounced the word “transformation” in front of me, while explaining some Arabic grammatical phenomenon. Amazing! My father never heard about Chomsky nor his transformational theory. He was a traditional Arabic scholar. “Where was the connection?” I wondered. That was the enigma that kept torturing my mind for years. In this book I will raise the issue: is it a “development”, “plagiarism” or simply an “accident”.

Meeting Syrian Dr. Mazin Al-Waer at MIT in 1981, I found that he had interviewed Chomsky by asking him about the enormous Linguistic works done on Arabic. Chomsky answered by acknowledging having read the Al-Ajerumiyyah (another famous work done on Arabic grammar). “We Arabs believe that the efforts which the Arab linguists in the middle ages made in the field of linguistics are important and contributed a great deal to modern linguistics. What are your thoughts on this matter?

“I should say that before I began studying general theoretical linguistics i was doing Semitic linguistics. I remember studying the al-ajurrumiyah many years ago, more than thirty years ago I suppose, with Franz Rosenthal who is now at yale university. I was then an undergraduate student at the university of Pennsylvania, and I was quite interested in the tradition of Arabic and Hebrew grammar of the medieval period and much of my own thinking about language actually was influenced by some of that work. But I do not feel that I am enough of a scholar to be able to say what contribution this work has made in general.”

Years later one of my students wrote to him and asked him about “the influence of Sibawaih’s influence on him. [see Conclusion]

Again, years later, I lectured to some scholars at the free university of Berlin about the possible connection (influences) of the two grammars – Chomsky’s and Sibawaih’s. It caused a big row (fight); there was much polemics, instead of logical reasoning on their part, when I tried to relate the two theories. “It’s your opinion!” they said to me.

CHOMSKY

CHOMSKY LIFE

Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928. He is a famous American linguist and political activist. He produced his transformational-generative grammar in the late 50’s which is considered as a unique contribution to linguistic studies.

Chomsky learnt linguistics from his father William Chomsky who was a scholar of Hebrew and Arabic. Then became a student of famous American structuralism Zellig Harris at the University of Pennsylvania. he obtained his BA (1949), Masters (1951) and PhD (1955). In the later thesis he produced a seminal work of his transformational theory. He became professor of modern languages and linguistics at MIT in 1955 and is there for life! He was appointed Ferrari Ward for his TG grammar in 1966.

Chomsky’s theory invaded the academic world ever since the publication of his first book (1957). This book started a revolution in theoretical linguistics. It broke with the established American behaviorist school, which advocated that language is a structure based on experience and conditioning. On the contrary Chomsky defended the innate capacity of humans to learn language, which may explain that the child after hearing the grownups talk is capable of inferring the rules of his mother tongue and to sue those rules to produce an infinite number of sentences that he has never heard before.

Considering that human innate capacity, Chomsky also drew a distinction between the surface structure of language, which consists of the actual words and sounds that we hear and an underlying deep structure, which represents the logical structure of the utterance. The speaker of a language can easily produce and understand sentences based on a limited set of rules, which generate an infinite number of different sentences. Chomsky dubbed those rules “transformations” and believed that those rules are shared by all the languages of the world. They are genetically fixed in the human brain.

Chomsky’s revolutionary Transformational-Generative grammar oriented the whole linguistic research in the second half of the 20thc., for and against! Still, his “innate theory of language” did not achieve general consensus among the scholars. Some of his most important books are (1965), (1966) with the collaboration of Morris Hallo. (1968)

CHOMSKY'S TRANSFORMATIONAL SYNTAX

First Version

Phrase Structure Rules