The generative grammar theory and studies on Altaic languages

Abstract It has been a long tradition that all functional categories of Altaic languages are treated as morphological element of content words and recognized as grammatical categories of a noun or a verb. Such an approach of blindly imitating the framework of inflectional Indo-European languages’ grammar wiped out all the referable idiosyncratic meanings of the Altaic agglutinative functional constituents developed through the long process of grammaticalization. As a result, the studies of the Altaic languages’ grammar were led into dead end, and the scholars in the field couldn’t able to interpret even the simplest syntactic structures. Thanks to the cognitive revolution launched by Chomsky in the linguistic field. Due to the enlightenment of his Generative Grammar theory, we have had now a second chance of reviewing the Altaic languages and taken a satisfactory step toward the adequacy of observation, description and interpretation. By recalling his breakthrough achievements over the past 30 years, the author of this paper attributes his accomplishments to the two major breaking points: first, being able to get rid of the grammatical framework of the inflectional languages, and second, identifying the head status of functional constituents in the Altaic languages.