Persistent Topics in Linguistic Theory

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Abstract
Contemporary study of language has turned to questions of linguistic structure and cognitive psychology of a sort that aroused little interest in the immediately preceding period. The extent to which this is a return to long neglected topics rather than an innovation is not widely appreciated, however, and I would like to comment briefly on this matter here.A central topic of much current research is what we may call the “creative” aspect of language use, that is, its unboundedness and freedom from stimulus control. The speaker-hearer whose normal use of language is “creative,” in this sense, must have internalized a system of rules that determines the semantic interpretations of an unbounded set of sentences; he must, in other words, be in control of what is now often called a generative grammar of his language. A generative grammar must determine the structural description of each possible sentence, where the structural description of a sentence is a formal object of some sort that contains what information the rules of the language provide concerning the semantic content and phonetic form of this sentence.

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