Syntax – Theory and Analysis. Volume 1

It is thus instructive to look at Chomsky’s introduction of the terms of substantive and formal universals. The former are characterized as follows: “A theory of substantive universals claims that items of a particular kind in any language must be drawn from a fixed class of items.” (Chomsky 1965: 28) Formal universals receive the following introduction: “The property of having a grammar meeting a certain abstract condition might be called a formal linguistic universal, if shown to be a general property of natural languages. Recent attempts to specify the abstract conditions that a generative grammar must meet have produced a variety of proposals concerning formal universals (…) For example, consider the proposal that the syntactic component of a grammar must contain transformational rules (…) mapping semantically interpreted deep structures into phonetically interpreted surface structures, or the proposal that the phonological component of a grammar consists of a sequence of rules, a subset of which may apply cyclically to successively more dominant constituents of the surface structure (a transformational cycle …)” (Chomsky 1965: 29).

Syntax can look back on a long tradition. The term itself is ambiguous. On the one hand, it is understood as a means of structural and descriptive analysis of individual languages using clearly defined instruments. Naturally, syntactic analyses can be comparative, spanning several languages. On the other hand, syntax is understood as syntactic theory, the aim of which is to decide which instruments can be sensibly applied to syntactic analysis. Syntactic theory thus defines the aims of syntactic research.