The presentation of linguistic examples in the 1950s: An unheralded change

Abstract

This paper deals with a dramatic change in the presentation of linguistic examples in the linguistics literature of the twentieth century, a change coinciding (not accidentally) with the introduction of transformational generative grammar (TGG) in the 1950s. Our investigation of this change and the circumstances that gave rise to it leads us to reconsider the question of continuity and discontinuity in the history of linguistics in this crucial period, focusing on the question of the audience to which the earliest publications in TGG were directed. We argue that this was an audience of nonlinguists (information theorists and mathematical logicians) and that transformations were introduced by Chomsky, the founder of TGG, as a way to preserve, within the new paradigm of formal grammar theory, established insights of a purely linguistic nature