Tracking the origins of transformational generative grammar1

Tracking the main influences of 19thand 20th-century mathematics, logic and philosophy on pre-1958 American linguistics and especially on early Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) is an ambitious crossdisciplinary endeavour. Ideally it would call for expertise in the methods of intellectual historiography, the history and content of 20th-century American linguistics, the history and philosophy of science (including logic and mathematics), the tools and results of mathematical logic, and the theory of computable functions. Scholars fully versed in all of these fields are rare indeed. If Marcus Tomalin makes some mistakes in his book (henceforth LFS), that should not be surprising. What is surprising is how much progress he makes in furthering intellectually serious work on the history of modern linguistics, and how wide his reading in the relevant technical literature has been. LFS locates the intellectual roots of TGG in the methods developed by 19thand 20th-century mathematics and logic for exhibiting the conceptual structure of theories and constructing rigorous proofs of theorems. Tomalin discusses the methods developed by Augustin-Louis Cauchy for the rigorisation of the calculus in the 1820s; Whitehead & Russell's use of the axiomatic method in Principia Mathematica (1910-1913); the Hilbert program (in the 1920s) to prove all of mathematics consistent; Bloomfield's early axiomatisation of a general linguistic theory (1926); Carnap's logical empiricist proposals for the logical reconstruction of science on an experiential basis in the 1920s and 1930s; and Goodman's (1951) adaptation and revision of Carnap (1928). Earlier histories of TGG have not investigated