投稿者: 
チョムスキーにとっての言語観について
チョムスキーと言えば、生成文法を提唱した言語学界の大家である。
しかし、生成文法は、非常に難解な理論として有名であり、その理論の理解に苦しむ人が多数いる。個人的に生成文法の理解を難しくしていることの一因がチョムスキーの言語観にあるのではないかと考えている。
その言語観が表れている一節を引用したい。
There was, I think, one major conceptual change that took place at the origins of the work in what is now called generative grammar, and that really didn’t lead to inconsistencies with other theories but to concern with a new type of questions. To put it at its simplest, I think the change was a change of focus from the study of language to the study of grammar.
In the whole long and very rich history of what is now called linguistics, the object of investigation was essentially language; that is, people wanted to find what the elements were of particular languages, where the properties of those elements were, and so on. The grammar was just the set of statements the linguist put together that characterized that entity called a language.
Generative grammar has a totally different concern. From the point of view of generative grammar, language may not even exist. In fact, in my view it is very unclear what the notion of language refers to, if anything. Language is not one of the things in the real world; that is, it isn’t a thing out there. Whatever it is, it’s some sort of complex derived notion, maybe no notion: In fact, it doesn’t seem to be a linguistic notion, at least not linguistically definable. However, there is something in the real world, namely, what’s in your head and what’s in my head, more or less shared between your head and my head, that makes this discussion possible. That is something in the real world, but it is not a language — we don’t have a language in our heads. Rather, what we have in our heads is some kind of system of rules that determines the properties of expressions over an indefinite range.
That system of rules is what is called grammar. The term is misleading because it is very different from the kind of grammar that a traditional grammarian wrote. It may overlap in some respects but its purpose is different; therefore, it will tend to develop in a different way. The grammar in our head is something in the real world. In fact, the grammar is part of the characterization of the present state of an organism.
(Chomsky, 1984: 25–6)
参考文献
- Chomsky, N. (1984). Modular Approaches to the Study of the Mind. (No Title).