In 1957 he wrote the book Syntactic Structures, an elaboration on his doctoral thesis from 1955, in which he introduces [transformational grammars]?. He considers utterances (words and sentences) to represent the surface structure of deeply rooted concepts inside the brain (surface structure versus deep structure). Transformation rules govern the process of creating utterances. The capability to carry out these processes is genetic and innate?. They happen subconsciously. With a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms man is able to produce an infinite number of sentences. This includes sentences nobody has ever said before. Other people will readily understand them because of their innate language understanding capability. When a child learns to speak the mother's language, Chomsky claims, then this language generating/analysing system (a [universal grammar]?) is set to a specific set of rules the child gets from the language community. Any child can learn any language as the first language. He notes that a child learns the language at an astonishing pace and his theory sets out why this is the case. Later on, when the rule set becomes stabilized, language learning becomes much harder.
In 1957 he wrote the book Syntactic Structures, an elaboration on his doctoral thesis from 1955, in which he introduces [transformational grammars]?. He considers utterances (words and sentences) to represent the surface structure of deeply rooted concepts inside the brain (surface structure versus deep structure, a distinction he doesn't use anymore). Transformation rules govern the process of creating utterances. The capability to carry out these processes is genetic and innate?. They happen subconsciously. With a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms man is able to produce an infinite number of sentences. This includes sentences nobody has ever said before. Other people will readily understand them because of their innate language understanding capability. When a child learns to speak the mother's language, Chomsky claims, then this language generating/analysing system (a [universal grammar]?) is set to a specific set of rules the child gets from the language community. Any child can learn any language as the first language. He notes that a child learns the language at an astonishing pace and his theory sets out why this is the case. Later on, when the rule set becomes stabilized, language learning becomes much harder.
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