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A linguistic theory that attempts to describe a native speaker's tacit grammatical knowledge by a system of rules that in an explicit and well-defined way specify all of the well-formed, or grammatical, sentences of a language while excluding all ungrammatical, or impossible, sentences.
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The theory of language structures first proposed in Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957). Just as physics studies the forms of physically possible processes, so linguistics should study the form of possible human languages. This would define the limits of language by delimiting the kinds of processes that can occur in language from those that cannot. The result would be a universal grammar, from which individual languages would derive as, in effect, different ways of doing the same thing. Variations such as vocabulary and principles governing word order would be revealed as different applications of the same underlying rules. Tacit knowledge of this universal grammar is pre-programmed, an innate biological endowment of normal human infants. The argument with which Chomsky supported the claim for such an endowment is known as the argument from the ‘poverty of stimulus’: it is argued that language-learning proceeds so fast in response to such a relatively slender body of ‘data’ that the infant must be credited with an innate propensity to follow the grammar of everybody else. The extent to which this argument treats the infant as a theorist or ‘little linguist’ has been much debated (see also language of thought hypothesis). In Chomsky's original model, language consists of phrase structure rules and transformations. Phrase structure rules represent the grammatically basic constituent parts of the sentence (e.g. a sentence might be a noun phrase + a verb phrase). Transformation rules change relations (as in the active/passive transformation) and determine how complex sentences may be formed from more simple ones. This latter function became taken over by the phrase structure rules in the later work (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, 1965) that introduced what became known as the standard theory. In this, phrase structure rules perform the task of defining the deep structure of a sentence, from which its surface structure is thought of as derived by means of possible repeated transformations. Deep structure bears some affinity to the idea of the logical structure of a sentence, thought of as the representation of the sentence that reveals its inferential properties. The notion did not survive in generative semantics, one of the successors to Chomsky's standard theory, in which transformation rules map semantic representations onto surface structures. The introduction of semantics is often thought to be a necessary amendment to the purely syntactic and grammatical approach of Chomsky's early theory.
After the standard theory came the extended standard theory, and eventually government-binding theory, both of which maintain an abstract and mathematical approach to the discovery of linguistic principles of the highest generality. Philosophically most interest has centred on the claim that complex grammatical principles might be innate, and on the relationship between syntax and semantics that is presupposed in the idea of a generative grammar. In general, philosophical formalists have been more interested in the possibility of unravelling concealed semantic structure, rather than in the more purely grammatical problems of linguistics.
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It has been suggested that generative linguistics be merged into this article or section. (Discuss) |
In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a proof-theoretic framework for the study of syntax partially inspired by formal grammar theory and popularized by Noam Chomsky, and more specifically to particular instantiations of this general framework, that is, grammatical frameworks adopting as a core assumption that the domain of a grammatical theory is to predict the precise set of sentences which would be considered "grammatical" in a given natural language while simultaneously predicting any other sentence's grammatical failings (and as such are able to "generate" the languages's grammar).
Generative grammar is thus characterized by a notion of grammaticality as a discrete (yes-or-no) parameter that can be established algorithmically. This contrasts with approaches of stochastic grammar which consider grammaticality as a probabilistic variable.
Its emphasis on computability and its historical conflation with the "nativist" postulate of an "innate" Universal grammar further contrasts with functional and behaviourist theories.
Any such framework of generative grammar is realized as a set of rules or principles that recursively "specify" or "generate" the well-formed expressions of a natural language. This encompasses a large set of different approaches to grammar. The term generative grammar has been associated with at least the following schools of linguistics:
Generative grammars can be described and compared with the aid of the Chomsky hierarchy proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s. This sets out a series of types of formal grammars with increasing expressive power. Among the simplest types are the regular grammars (type 3); Chomsky claims that regular grammars are not adequate as models for human language, because all human languages allow the embedding of strings within strings in an hierarchical way.
At a higher level of complexity are the context-free grammars (type 2). The derivation of a sentence by a context-free grammar can be depicted as a derivation tree. Linguists working in generative grammar often view such derivation trees as a primary object of study. According to this view, a sentence is not merely a string of words, but rather a tree with subordinate and superordinate branches connected at nodes.
Essentially, the tree model works something like this example, in which S is a sentence, D is a determiner, N a noun, V a verb, NP a noun phrase and VP a verb phrase:
The resulting sentence could be The dog ate the bone. Such a tree diagram is also called a phrase marker. They can be represented more conveniently in text form, (though the result is less easy to read); in this format the above sentence would be rendered as: [S [NP [D The ] [N dog ] ] [VP [V ate ] [NP [D the ] [N bone ] ] ] ]
However, Chomsky at some point argued that phrase structure grammars are also inadequate for describing natural languages. To address this, Chomsky formulated the more complex system of transformational grammar.
When generative grammar was first proposed, it was widely hailed as a way of formalizing the implicit set of rules a person "knows" when they know their native language and produce grammatical utterances in it (grammaticality intuitions). However Chomsky has repeatedly rejected that interpretation; according to him, the grammar of a language is a statement of what it is that a person has to know in order to recognise an utterance as grammatical, but not a hypothesis about the processes involved in either understanding or producing language.
In any case the reality is that most native speakers would reject many sentences produced even by a phrase structure grammar. For example, although very deep embeddings are allowed by the grammar, sentences with deep embeddings are not accepted by listeners, and the limit of acceptability is an empirical matter that varies between individuals, not something that can be easily captured in a formal grammar. Consequently, the influence of generative grammar in empirical psycholinguistics has declined considerably.
Generative grammar has been used in music theory and analysis such as by Fred Lerdahl and in
| Automata theory: formal languages and formal grammars | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Chomsky hierarchy |
Grammars | Languages | Minimal automaton |
| Type-0 | Unrestricted | Recursively enumerable | Turing machine |
| n/a | (no common name) | Recursive | Decider |
| Type-1 | Context-sensitive | Context-sensitive | Linear-bounded |
| n/a | Indexed | Indexed | Nested stack |
| n/a | Tree-adjoining | Mildly context-sensitive | Embedded pushdown |
| Type-2 | Context-free | Context-free | Nondeterministic pushdown |
| n/a | Deterministic context-free | Deterministic context-free | Deterministic pushdown |
| Type-3 | Regular | Regular | Finite |
| Each category of languages or grammars is a proper subset of the category directly above it. | |||
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Philosophy Dictionary. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Copyright © 1994, 1996, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Generative grammar". Read more |
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