| | Britain.tv Wikipedia - Linguistics |
 | | The central concern of autonomous theoretical linguistics is to characterize the nature of human linguistic ability, or competence: to explain what it is that an individual knows when an individual knows a language, and to explain how it is that individuals come to know languages. |
 | | Linguists working in frameworks such as Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) or Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) stress the importance of formalization and formal rigor in linguistic description, and may distance themselves somewhat from Chomsky's more recent work (the "Minimalist"?title=program for Transformational grammar), connecting more closely to earlier work of Chomsky's. |
 | | Linguists working in Optimality Theory state generalizations in terms of violable rules, which is a greater departure from mainstream linguistics, and linguists working in various kinds of functional grammar and Cognitive Linguistics tend to stress the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus departing importantly from the Chomskian paradigm. |
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