Chomskyan

English

Alternative forms

• Chomskian

Etymology

From Chomsky +‎ -an.

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Adjective

Chomskyan (comparative more Chomskyan, superlative most Chomskyan)

1. Relating to the linguist and activist Noam Chomsky.
   • 1989, Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, Psychology Press, →ISBN, page 107:

     A rhizome, as Deleuze and Guattari explain in Rhizome: an Introduction (1976), is the antithesis of a root-tree structure, or ‘arborescence’, the structural model which has dominated Western thought from Porphyrian trees, to Linnaean taxonomies, to Chomskyan sentence diagrams.

2. (linguistics) Of or relating to the theoretical approach introduced by Noam Chomsky, et al., especially transformational grammar.
   • 1985, Robert Burchfield, The English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 155:

     The differences between acceptable constructions like "Have you a book on modern music?" and unacceptable ones like "Read you a book on modern music?" need no Chomskyan signposts for a native speaker, and have very little to do with statistical probability but a lot to do with common sense.

Noun

Chomskyan (plural Chomskyans)

1. (linguistics) A follower or adherent of Chomsky's linguistic theories; a transformational grammarian.

See also

• transformational grammar