Chomsky

Nida's translation theory owed a lot to a new trend in linguistics. Linguistics which had hitherto worked on languages and their structural aspects, began to look for universals or commonalties that underlay different languages. Translators became interested in this as this helped them in their search for satisfactory translation methods. The pioneer of this new wave in linguistics was Noam Chomsky whose Syntactic Structures was published in 1957.

Generative transformational grammar, as conceptualized by Chomsky, had a different perspective of language. Grammar is structured and is composed of numerous levels. The ‘base component' is the primary level. It consists of two kinds of rules – phrase structure rules and lexical rules. Both are common to all languages. Phrase structure rules are those governing semantic and syntactic information of a language and generate deep structure. This deep structure is modified by transformational rules and generates surface structure. All sentences in a language belong to surface structure. According to Chomsky, the phrase structure rules that encode the semantic and syntactic information of a language are similar to the workings of the unconscious in the human mind. Deep structure determines meaning and surface structure determines sound.

Language learning according to Chomsky is intuitive; he stated that the human mind knows language even before formally acquiring it. There were many sceptics who questioned this statement. Gentzler points out that it had another drawback in that it was not based on a living language but an ideal situation. He quotes Chomsky to prove his point: “Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions...” (Gentzler 49).