An essential question that preoccupied the field of linguistics was the common grammatical structure of all human languages. As the most prominent ideologist in this field, Chomsky’s early insights were that children become proficient in the native language of their parents very rapidly if they receive enough exposure to it. This led him to conclude that we must have some kind of innate knowledge of the structure or syntax of the language. If this were true then it should be possible to explain the acquisition of any language by a simple algorithm. However, it was not clear what this innate knowledge consisted of. Chomsky, therefore, proposed an alternative view of language, called ‘transformational generative grammar’. Rather than assuming that a child learns the grammar of the language they speak, he suggested that language itself is acquired as a result of a series of transformations applied to a small number of basic elements. These elements could be thought of as primitive words or morphemes. Transformations might include combining two morphemes together to create a compound word, changing the inflection of a verb to match its subject, or adding prefixes to verbs to change their meaning.
With this, he concluded that humans must have some innate knowledge of language structure and it must be universal. The idea was similar to the link between logic and mathematics and could be traced back to Cartesian rationalism.
