Genesis of Two Algebraic Theories of Language

1.1 In the present paper, we present our view of how two algebraic theories of language, formulated and developed at about the same point in linguistic history, came into existence. The theories and their variants we have chosen to this end are, on the one hand, the standard theory of transformational grammar, formulated in the mid-1960’s by Noam Chomsky, and, on the other hand, an early version of the functional generative description of language, formulated at about the same time by Petr Sgall as an alternative to Chomsky’s transformational grammar. Should the reader question, or even think in vain, our honest pursuit of two theories to which the bell seems to have tolled long ago, we may not have any cogent arguments at hand to object. However, we bid him spare a while reading and eventually see for himself whether his initial doubts were justified. In this regard, we want to show that even though both algebraic theories of language, treated in greater detail below, might nowadays be considered out-of-date, a brief account of their genesis may help better understand, or recall, the theoretical background of their current variants. We are going to argue, among other things, that while the theory of transformational grammar is not always easy to trace back to the theoretical assumptions it openly declares, the theory of functional generative description usually makes careful provisions for both the functional and generative sources of its theoretical inspiration. In doing so, we will follow a single main aim: to reemphasise that both theories are, first and foremost, theoretical constructs combining in their peculiar ways a portion of linguistic data with a set of formal means by which the linguistic data is to be represented.