Abstract :
As recently as 1997, Noam Chomsky has reiterated what he had affirmed on several occasions, especially during the 1970s, namely, that when working out his ideas on rule ordering for his Masterʹs thesis on Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew in 1951, he did not have access to Bloomfieldʹs "Menomini Morphophonemics" 1939 paper, suggesting that the generative model of linguistic analysis he developed at the time was more or less original with him. The present paper argues that even if he did not have direct access to a copy of Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague vol. 8 prior to the completion of his M.A. thesis, he had very likely absorbed the essentials of Bloomfieldʹs ideas about rule ordering from various sources, including reaading the proofs of his supervisor Zellig S. Harrisʹ main theoretical work, Methods in Structural Linguistics, in early 1947, in which the salient points of Bloomfieldʹs 1939 argument are discussed in a section entitled "Morphophonemics". Indeed, although Harrisʹ book was not published until 1951, it had been circulating in manuscript form since 1946, and Harrisʹ preface, signed January 1947, thanks Chomsky for helping with the proofs. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that Harrisʹ Methods contains the essentials of the generative approach to language which is by now almost exclusively associated with Chomskyʹs name. A further case can be made that Harrisʹ 1941 and 1948 articles on Hebrew provided more than simply the data of which Chomskyʹs 1951 M.A. thesis constitutes largely a `restatementʹ in a much more abstract, technical form of his own making. The present paper argues that there has been much more continuity and cumulative advance in American linguistics than we have been made to believe both by the active participants in the `revolutionʹ and its historians.
