Historyczne i metodologiczne uwarunkowania współczesnego generatywizmu

The paper discusses the historical and methodological background of Chomsky’s generative enterprise. It briefly characterizes the context in which generative grammar developed, concentrating on Frege’s logic and linguistic structuralism (Saussure’s and Bloomfield’s), and points to the differences in these approaches. The main part of the paper discusses the notion of language as defined by Chomsky, from his earlier writings (such as Syntactic Structures, 1957), through Government and Binding theory, to the more recent Minimalist Program, and studies concerned with biolinguistcs. The major claim of the paper is that the early model of generative grammar, especially its formalism and description of generative mechanisms (phrase structure rules, transformations, account of natural language recursion) has survived the test of time. Whether this will be the case with the biolinguistic claims of the more recent developments within generative grammar remains to be seen.