, linguistics was broken down into two main catagories, historical linguistics and structural liguistics. Noam Chomsky, an American linguist played an important role in the development of linguistics. Chomsky founded transformational-generative grammer. Transformation-generative grammer is a highly influential system of linguistic analysis. Because of Chomsky and his contributions, the behaviorsits accounts of language were challenged, human computations became the focus for liguistics, and focus was directed away from how grammer's are learned to how grammers are a mental 'organ' (Andrews, The Birth of Cognitive Science)...
