HAS THERE BEEN A “CHOMSKYAN IMPACT” ON

INDIAN MINDS

Dr Meti Mallikarjun
Assistant Professor
Dept of Linguistics
Sahyadri Arts College, Vidyanagar
Shimoga -577203
meti.mallikarjun@gamil.com

Abstract
Noam Chomsky Hailed as one of the most
brilliant and influential intellectuals of the twentieth
century, he has attracted international renown for his
groundbreaking research into the nature of human
language and communication. A prolific scholar and
professor of linguistics who influences across the world
and whose work is most cited that proves his intellectual
credibility. His work produced what is referred to as the
“Chomskyan Revolution,” a wide-reaching intellectual
realignment and debate with implications that transcend
formal linguistics to include psychology, philosophy, and
even genetics. Keeping the above-cited insights, this
paper develops epistemological framework in order to
bring out how far Chomsky has influenced on Indian minds
as far as linguistic studies are concerned.
This paper does not attempt to review the
whole influence of the Chomskyan thoughts on Indian
minds. Instead, this will concentrate on just those aspects
of its relevance is taken into consideration in

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 understanding the ‘knowledge of Language’ in
contemporary language studies at one hand. In addition,
why did not Chomskyan Linguistic thoughts influence
Indians at the other hand?

Part-I
Chomskyan Linguistics: A Paradigm Shift

To understand Chomskyan Linguistic paradigm, we must

begin with his methodology and the assumptions interlaced with his
volatile claims, which needs an epistemological explanations to
understand methodological framework. Here is an attempt to mention a
few of those assumptions; in general, ‘paradigm’ means an accepted
model/pattern. It permits the replication of the model, any one of which
could serve the pattern. In science, however, a paradigm is not just a
replication. It is “an object of further articulation and specification under
new and more stringent conditions” [Kuhn, 1970:23 quoted from; A. k.
Sinha: 2000:1]. This paradigm gave a radical break up with
behaviorism hence Chomsky demolished ‘Behavioristic approach’ and
criticized its epistemological framework. He regards language as a
‘mental organ/phenomena’ not as a ‘social/behavioral phenomena’ for
him language study as a set of mutually dependent entities in human
mind i.e. brain pertaining to language which can be described through
models of representations in the mind. He contributed substantially to a
major methodological shift in the human sciences, turning away from the
prevailing empiricism of the middle of the twentieth century: behaviorism
in psychology, structuralism in linguistics and positivism in philosophy.

Noam Chomsky has brought a seminal work entitled

Syntactic Structures in the year 1957 (Mouton & Co). The paradigm
shift took place in the study of Linguistics across the world. Chomsky’s
thoughts were the major influencing factor for shifting away from the
empiricism perspective to an investigation into language as a uniquely
human mental faculty with its own biologically determined structure and
principles. Hence, Chomsky deems it “it is crucial for the development of
adequacy theory to perceive much higher goals than descriptive
adequacy, even utopian ones [AT 24f]. He envisions explanatory
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 adequacy when a linguistic theory succeeds in selecting a descriptively
adequate grammar based on primary linguistic data in relating an
explanation of the intuition of the native speaker to an empirical
hypothesis about the innate predisposition of the child [AT 25ff]. Instead
of ‘gross coverage of a large mass of data’, which is not an achievement
of any theoretical interest of importance. ‘Linguistics should discover a
complex of data that differentiates between conflicting conceptions of
linguistic structure by showing ones ‘can explain the data via some
empirical assumption about the form of language’[AT26]. Even for
descriptive adequacy, an explanatory theory of the form of grammar
provides a main tool because the choice is always underdetermined by
data and because relevant data from successful grammars for other
languages can be collated [AT 41]. Though both ‘unrealized goals’,
descriptive and explanatory adequacy are crucial at every stage of
understanding linguistic structure [AT 36, 46]. For Chomsky, a theory of
language can in fact, ‘be regarded as a hypothesis about the language-
forming capacity of humans and language learning [AT 37]. We can
formulate the Chomskyan paradigm by keeping the following legacies in
mind:

I. Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-hearer

in a completely homogeneous speech community
II. The second major legacy of the half a century of generative
linguistics has been the ‘Reinstitution of the hypothetic-deductive
method’
III. Mutually contradicting revisions within the Chomskyan paradigm
IV. Contradicting models of descriptive and explanatory adequacy have
become the leading ideas of minimalist program

Some events change the history, some just change the

way a person sees that history, and it is not always easy to tell the
difference. But Noam Chomsky has changed our perspectives of
linguistics, serves as a standpoint to speculate that faculty of language is
unique to the human species. This implies that there are human-specific
biological changes that lie at the basis of human language. However, it is
not clear what the nature of such changes is, and how they could be
shaped by evolution.

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 Part-II
Empiricist versus rationalist approach:

1. Empiricism: an empiricist approach to language is dominated by the

observation of naturally occurring data, typically through the medium of
the corpus. For example, we may decide to determine whether sentence
x is a valid sentence of language y by looking in a corpus of the language
in question and gathering evidence for the grammatically, or otherwise of
the sentence. Empirical Problems of Language Acquisition are; Imitation,
Reinforcement, Analogy and Motherese etc… The American structural
linguistics was [i.e. Bloomfieldian Linguistics] entirely developed based on
empirical procedures. Interestingly, this particular theory of Linguistics
has predominately dominated the linguistic intellectual world for half a
century especially the Indian Linguistics.

2. Rationalism: rationalist theories are based on the development of a

theory of mind and have as a fundamental goal of cognitive plausibility.
In the case of linguistics, the aim is to develop a theory of human
language processing, but actively seeks to make the claim that it
represents how the processing is actually undertaken. Chomsky has
provided extensively generated and substantial amount of arguments in
order to understand how far he was influenced by cognitive psychology in
the development of a Theory of Transformational Generative Grammar.
This theory was emerged as an alternative to Bloomfieldian Linguistics,
subsequently, to the Behavioristic theory as well. It is very apparent to
note that, Chomsky has disproved the philosophical and methodological
realities of the American Structuralism.
in this opposition between the methodology of confining
research to observable facts and that of using the observable facts as clues
to hidden and underlying laws, Chomsky’s revolution is doubly interesting:
first, within the field of linguistics, it has precipitated a conflict which is an
example of the wider conflict; and secondly, Chomsky has used his results
about language to try to develop general anti-behaviorist and anti-
empiricist conclusions about the nature of the human mind that go beyond
the scope of linguistics.

His naturalistic approach to the study of language

contributed to a shift of thought in the area of philosophy of language and
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mind. He was first to see the connection and dependency between the
structure of language and the structure of human mind. This is what
Chomsky has tried to establish the theory of Transformational Generative
Grammar. This grammar has built up mainly by focusing the following
hypothesis;

1. What constitutes knowledge of language?

2. How is knowledge of language acquired?
3. How is knowledge of language put to use

It is very evident to quote Searle here “Chomsky’s work is one

of the most remarkable intellectual achievements of the present era,
comparable in scope and coherence to the work of Keynes or Freud. It has
done more than simply produce a revolution in linguistics; it has created a
new discipline of generative grammar and is having a revolutionary effect
on two other subjects, philosophy and psychology. Not the least of its
merits is that it provides an extremely powerful tool even for those who
disagree with many features of Chomsky’s approach to language. In the
long run, I believe his greatest contribution will be that he has taken a
major step toward restoring the traditional conception of the dignity and
uniqueness of man” [by John R. Searle: June 29, 1972]. This quote makes
every one of us to realize the importance of Chomskyan Linguistics in the
Indian context also especially in the field of language studies. Since India
happens to be a multilingual country in which linguistic conflict persists for
ever between dominated versus dominating languages. According to
Chomsky, the very fact of linguistics is to account for the speaker’s
understanding of the internal structure of languages [i.e. Universal
Grammar] that justifies every language is equally potential. At the same, it
would able to discover the parametric fixation of every given language i.e.
re-evaluating the linguistic prehistory of India.

Part-III

Why did not Indian Linguists follow Chomsky?

In the 19 th and 20th centuries, Western scholars began

to study languages that were hitherto unfamiliar to Europeans and most
North Americans. Description, not prescription, became the goal of those
who were seeking to write grammars for those previously unrecorded
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languages. Because of this development, linguists revolutionized the
study of Language. By the 1930s, a strong tradition of descriptive
linguists stood in opposition to the traditional prescriptive approach.

In case of Indian languages, the Christian missionaries

started analyzing Descriptive Grammars for Regional/tribal/indigenous
languages during colonial and post-colonial periods. This linguistics school
of thoughts influenced very effectively on the budding linguists who took
linguistics as their profession in India. Apart from this, the aims of Indian
linguists were to understand very fundamental issues relating to genetic
affiliation of language families, typological similarities and dissimilarities
among Indian languages. They wanted to demonstrate and establish that
the linguistic autonomous of the Indian languages. Indian linguistic
tradition firmly decided that Sanskrit is the mother of all the Indian
languages genetically. The grammatical model for Indian languages was
once again Sanskrit. This never paved the way to create an alternative
grammatical model for Indian languages except Tamil Grammar i.e.
Tholkappiyam. These arguments can be elaborated in specific conditions
by keeping the following views:

1. Genetic classification:

Linguistic typological studies became very necessary to study of

all the Indian Languages linguistically. It was felt very strongly that the
classification of these languages according to their structural features and
genetic affiliation was needed. This particular linguistic approach was
aiming to describe and explain the common properties and the structural
diversities of the Indian Languages in particular and the world's
languages in general. These Linguistic typological studies were basically
dealt with the issue of comparing within-languages and across
Languages. These observations became as tools of Linguistic evaluation.
With these results Indian linguists were able to identify the various
language families based on the distribution of structural patterns among
the languages. These were the contributing developments in deciding the
genitival factors of Indian linguistics in specific and world linguistics in
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general. In order to decide that how two languages are genealogically
(genetically) related in terms of their structures. And what are the
linguistic possibilities were available to establish genealogical relations
among languages to reconstruct their common ancestor. Say, for
instance, Proto-Dravidian, Proto-Indo-European etc. such considerations
lead further to interdisciplinary cooperation with archaeology (the
physical record), anthropology (the cultural environment), and population
genetics (biological inheritance).

2. Summer School Influence on Indian Linguists:

Soon after the political independence of our country, it was

inevitable to prepare an intellectual community. During this period, some
short term courses were conducted for teaching linguistics, a series of
summer school were conducted by Deccan College, Pune and other premier
Linguistics Institutes of India. These programs were sponsored by
Rockefeller Foundation and American Linguistic society; this was the
beginning of Indian Scholars’ career as Linguists. The Scholars like M B
Emeneau who were participated in these training courses were received
their training with Anthropologist Edward Sapir, who is specialized in
American Structuralism. Subsequently Indian linguists also got their training
in American Structuralism i.e. Bloomfieldian Linguistics.

Christ missionaries who were belong to British Raj and

European continent had already started analyzing Indian Languages in
Comparative and Historical Linguistic Perspectives. Colonization brought
Europeans into contact with a wide variety of Asian Languages. These
Scholars compiled word lists in many languages and used them in language
comparisons. Robert Caldwell’s pioneering and path-breaking work on
Comparative Grammar of South Indian Languages was the inspiration for
this work. That certain Languages were related to one another became
gradually appreciated, over the decades, this came to be established on
increasingly firmer footing as techniques were developed and honed.
Ultimately this led to the establishment of the Comparative Method. And all
these colonial Scholars were trained under the Neo-Grammarian School.
The challenges before these Scholars were to understand and analyze the
languages of India in specific and languages of South Asia in general.
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 At other hand, simultaneously, scholars like Dr.S K Chatterji,
Ramaswamy Aiyar, Dr. S M Katre, Dr. T P Meenakshisundaram Pillai, Dr. G S
Gai, in Karnataka, Dr. T N Sreekantaiya, Dr. Narasimhia, the first generation
of scholars were emerged. By now, considerable research had been
undertaken to bring to light the history of the development of the Dravidian
and Indo-Aryan Languages. Interrelated characters of these languages and
other important linguistic aspects were developed in the due course that
motivated to realize the typological aspects among Indian languages.

With the result of this scholarship, their orientation and summer

schools, the theoretical orientation of Indian linguistics was established to
understand the empirically based explanations that anchor the facts of
linguistic similarities and dissimilarities among the languages. Indian
linguists were committed to exploring the integration of linguistic structure
and language use, recognizing both as essential to any explanation of how
languages come to be as they are. And further, this was concentrated on
Structural analyses that involved typologically, genetically, and areally
diverse languages. And this was focusing on phonology, morphology,
syntax, and discourse of the languages as well as the interactions among
these levels. At this time Noam Chomsky was emerged as a linguist, and
gave a unique dimension to language study that revolutionized linguistics.
Since for Indian linguists, this has been the period of intensive descriptive
and comparative activities for Indian linguists. There fore, they could not
accept any new modals for understanding languages.

3. Anti- behavioristic/ Bloomfieldian Linguistic

Approach:

He rebelled against the habitual formulistic equations, which

reduced human language to a particular behavioristic pattern. Chomsky
changed the direction of linguistics away from empiricism and towards
rationalism in a remarkably short space of time. Consequently, this has
revolutionized linguistics in term of analysis and perception of a
language. In doing so, he apparently invalidated the corpus as a source of
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evidence in linguistic enquiry. He suggested that the corpus could never
be a useful tool for the linguist, as the linguist must seek to model
language for competence rather than performance. Competence
[implicit] is best described as our tacit, internalized knowledge of a
language. Performance [explicit] is external evidence of language
competence, and is usage on particular occasions when, crucially, factors
other than our linguistic competence may affect its form. This led into the
epistemological debate on the orientations of linguistics. Chomsky has
substantiated this view with his review of B.F. Skinner’s “Verbal
Behavior”, in which he questioned the behaviorists’ approach to the study
of language and behavior. In Chomsky’s view, (1959) language is not
solely a set of habits developed in the process of conditioning but an
innate predisposition of mind/human. This intellectual debate may allow
us to generate different versions of empiricist and rationalist approaches.
Philosophers argue that it is only epistemic status/philosophical stance
regarding [language] sense of experience of any given thing. In
Chomsky’s mature theory, as expounded in Aspects of the Theory of
Syntax (1965), the aims become more ambitious: to explain all of the
linguistic relationships between the sound system and the meaning
system of the language. To achieve this, the complete “grammar” of a
language, in Chomsky’s technical sense of the word, must have three
parts, a syntactical component that generates and describes the internal
structure of the infinite number of sentences of the language,
a phonological component that describes the sound structure of the
sentences generated by the syntactical component, and
a semantic component that describes the meaning structure of the
sentences. The heart of the grammar is the syntax; the phonology and
the semantics are purely “interpretative,” in the sense that they describe
the sound and the meaning of the sentences produced by the syntax but
do not generate any sentences themselves.

Part – IV

9
Conclusion: Individuals interest in Chomskyan
Linguistics

This is very much true that Chomskyan impact has not

been there on Indian minds. At the same time, it cant’ be denied, there
was an effort initiated by many of the budding linguists, who were
influenced by Chomsky at the individual level in the mid of 20th century.
Linguists like Prof. Agesthialingom, Annamalai University, Prof R.N
Srivatsava, University of Delhi, and Prof A K Ramanujan [who did PhD in
Generative Grammar on Kannada] of course, who have not been able to
institutionalize in full fledge the Chomskyan modal of linguistics in India.

These scholars’ efforts were confined to PhD dissertations and

close-door seminars. However, we may regard this effort is a very
important one as far as Chomskyan Linguistics is concerned in the Indian
context. This initiation has made a very big impact on up-coming linguists
in India at the end of twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. Notice that this whole process of development of linguistics
school of thoughts in India took place with various influences. Universities
like JNU, University of Delhi, CIEFL, IIT’s, Bhartiyiar University, and other
few instaurations have taken Chomskyan Linguistics into consideration to
some extend for language studies. This linguistics program gradually led
to design the methodology for the description and analysis of Indian
Languages in computational Linguistics. The very sad thing is, none of
universities of Karnataka were never tried to have Chomskyan Linguistics,
neither part of their curriculum nor at the individual level even of this day.
Interestingly, various researches have been done on Kannada by
adopting Chomskyan modal, outside the Karnataka and India as well.

This could be realized based on the above discussions,

Chomskyan modal has not been influenced on Indian minds, because, the
kind of training, the first generation linguists received, consequently, the
initiation took by the responsible professors of Linguistics of the various
universities of India during the development of Indian Linguistics School
of Thought. It must be noted that Chomsky is one of the greatest linguists
of the twentieth century. His contribution to linguistics matters in the
history of world Linguistics.
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 References

1. Agesthialingom, S. 1967. A Generative Grammar of Tamil: A Fragment of

Tamil Syntax. Annamalai University, Annamalainagara
2. Bloomfield, L. 1963. Language. [Reprint] Motilal Banarsidas, Delhi
3. Burrow, T. 1968. Collected Papers on Dravidian Linguistics. Annamalai
University, Annamalainagara
4. Burrow, T. and Emeneau. M.B 1984. A Dravidian Etymological
Dictionary. [second edition] Clarendon Press, Oxford
5. Caldwell, R. 1976. A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South
Indian family of Languages. [Reprint] University of Madras, Madras
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