Noam Chomsky and the Soviet Linguistics in the 1970s – 1980s

The author outlines the reception of Noam Chomsky’s philosophy of language and his theoretical linguistic models, in Soviet linguistics of the 1970s–1980s. Authors who in the 1960s were fascinated by Chomsky’s transformational model and used formal methods of studying language (the ‘formalists’) by that time lost interest in his works, because the generative semantics project led by George Lakoff, James McCawley and others, and later Igor Mel’čuk’s “Meaning ⇔ Text” built on similar assumptions, seemed to them more promising. The development of generative grammar from rule theory to constraint theory and the triumph of lexicalism over generative semantics in the 1970s went unnoticed by researchers in the USSR. The “orthodox” group of Soviet linguists who tried to find support in the official ideology, launched a fierce campaign against Chomsky which in spite of some theoretical interest, raised no contentful discussion and ended in failure

Generative grammar · Grammar · Minimalist program · Theoretical linguistics · Transformational grammar · European Linguistics and Anthropology · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation