Generative grammar

Lecture 4

1. The phenomenon of generative grammar in modern linguistics

2. N. Chomsky’s transformational grammar

3. Theoretical consequences of generative theory

Transformational-Generative grammar or (Generative Grammar) was initially worked out by the American linguist Zelling Harris as a method of analyzing sentences and was later elaborated by another American scholar Noam Chomsky as a synthetic method of “generating” (constructing) sentences.

The term “generative grammar”, which was introduced into linguistics by N. Chomsky in the mid-1950s, is nowadays employed in two rather different senses. In its original, narrower and more technical, sense, it refers to sets of rules which define various kinds of language-systems.

It its second, broader sense – for which we will use the term “generativism” – it refers to a whole body of theoretical and methodological assumptions about language-structure. Not only was N. Chomsky the originator of the version of generative grammar most widely used in linguistics, but he has also been most influential, not only in linguistics, but also in other disciplines. Among the others the names of L. Haegeman, R. Jackendoff, A. Radford and others can be mentioned here.

The term “generative”, used as a definition, is to be understood in exactly the sense in which it is used in mathematics. It is in the abstract, or static, sense of the term that the rules of a generative grammar are said to generate the sentences of a language. The important point is that “generate”, in this sense, does not relate to any process of sentence-production in real time by speakers (or machines). A generative grammar is mathematically precise specification of the grammatical structure of the sentence it generates. The general hypothesis is: syntax is driven by morphology. It allows to understand how a child learns his or her language.

Another important point to note about the definition of generative grammar is that it allows for the existence of many different kinds of generative grammars. The question for theoretical linguistics is this: which, if any, of the indefinitely many different kinds of generative grammars will best serve as a model for the grammatical structure of natural languages? The question presupposes that all natural languages can be modeled by grammars of the same kind. This assumption is commonly made these days in theoretical linguistics. One reason why generativists make it is that all human beings are apparently capable of acquiring any natural language. It is in principle possible that very different kinds of generative grammars should be appropriate for the description of different kinds of natural languages. But so far there is no reason to believe that this is so.

The finite-state grammars are not powerful enough in principle; it is largely because finite-state models were being constructed in the 1950s by behaviourist psychologists that Chomsky was concerned to demonstrate their inappropriateness as models of the grammatical structure of language.

Transformational grammars, on the other hand, are certainly powerful enough in principle to serve as models for the grammatical description of natural language-systems. But there are all sorts of transformational grammars. They permit the formulation of rules which are never required in the description of natural languages. Ideally, this is at the very heart of generativism, one wants a type of generative grammar which is just powerful enough to reflect directly and perspicuously, those properties of the grammatical structure of natural languages which are essential to them. Chomsky demonstrated, in his earliest work, that some kinds of generative grammars are intrinsically more powerful than others: they can generate all the formal languages that less powerful grammars cannot generate. In particular, he proved that finite-state grammars are less powerful than phrase-structure grammars (of various kinds) and that phrase-structure grammars are less powerful than transformational grammars.

Though a particular type of transformational grammar, formalized by Chomsky in the mid-1950-s and modified several times since then, has dominated theoretical syntax since that time. The stages in its development are: Standard theory, Extended standard theory, Government and Binding theory (=Theory of principles and parameters) and Minimalist theory. We’ll speak about the earliest version of generative grammar.

In 1957 N. Chomsky published his “Syntactic Structures”, a brief and watered down summary of several years of original research. In that book, and in his succeeded publications, he made a number of revolutionary proposals: he introduced the idea of generative grammar, developed a particular kind of generative grammar called transformational grammar, rejected his American predecessors’ emphasis on the description of data – in favour of highly theoretical approach based on a search for universal principles of language (later called universal grammar) – proposed to turn linguistics firmly into towards mentalism, and laid the foundations for integrating the field into as yet unnamed new discipline of cognitive science.

The essence of the approach is summarized by N. Chomsky as providing an answer to the question “How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?” By studying the human language faculty, it should be possible to show how a person constructs a knowledge system out of everyday experience, and thus move some way towards solving this problem.

The main point of the TG is that the endless variety of sentences in a language can be reduced to a finite number of kernels by means of transformations. These kernel sentences the basis for generating sentences by means of syntactic processes.

The appearance of N. Chomsky’s TG and its long lasting popularity all over the world and especially in the USA, can also be explained by the fact that in the previous centuries languages were studied exclusively for the purpose of reading their literatures. But the speed and frequency of international communication have outsripped the speed of teaching and learning languages. It became clear that a systemic scientific investigation is needed to advance the teaching of languages. Linguistics faced the task of working out an efficient workable theory to be applied to tackle practical problems, such as information data processing, electronic machine translation, pattering, aural comprehension of speech and others which seem to have direct application to classroom language teaching.

N. Chomsky’s theory of TG has to solve two fundamental problems, such as:

1. why a young child has the ability to gain in a short time and with no special tuition, a command of his own language;

2. why people speak their native languages however complex they may be.

The TG provided the following explanations:

1. Any language contains a rather small number of kernel sentences and their linguistic units (such as phonemes and morphemes), and all the other linguistic forms, sentences of different structure, and derived or generated from these kernel elements by certain derivation rules which are not very numerous or difficult.

2. It is the simplicity and regularity of the structure of any language that makes it possible for a child to grasp it and for human communities to speak it.

Transformational grammar has three major components: a syntactic component (dealing with syntax), a phonological component (dealing with sounds) and semantic component (dealing with meaning). Its syntactical component is split into two components: the base (the semantic component) and the transformational rules (phonological component).

N. Chomsky also drew particular attention, at the outset, to two properties of English and other natural languages which must be taken into account in the search for the right kind of generative grammar: recursiveness and constituent structure. Both of these are reflected, directly and perspicuously, in phrase structure grammar.

Recursiveness – the quality of being recursive, i.e. drawing upon itself.

Recursive – in logic, mathematics – the application of a function to its own values to generate an infinite sequence of values.

Transformational grammar is a grammar which sets up two levels of structure, and relates these levels by means of transformations: N. Chomsky suggests that every sentence has two levels of structure, one which is obvious on the surface, and another which is deep and abstract.

Deep structure is the set of all the base-positions (= original position which element occupies in the structure) of the elements in the sentence.

Surface structure is a structure obtained after various movements have rearranged elements.

It is clearly necessary to link these two levels in some way. He suggested that the deep structures are related to surface structures by processes called transformations. A deep structure is transformed into its related surface structure by the application of one or more transformations.

A major aim of generative grammar was to provide a means of analyzing sentences that took account of deep structure. To achieve this aim, Chomsky drew a fundamental distinction between a person’s knowledge of the rules of the language and the actual use of that language in real situations. The first referred to as competence; the second as performance. Linguistics should be concerned with the study of competence and not restrict itself to performance – something that was characteristic of previous linguistic studies in their reliance on samples (or “corpora”) of speech. Such samples were inadequate because they could provide only a tiny fractions of the sentences it is impossible to say in a language; they also contained many non-fluencies, changes of plan, and other errors of performance. Speakers use their competence to go far beyond the limitations of any corpus, by being able to create and recognize novel sentences, and to identify performance errors. The description of the rules governing the structure of this competence was thus the more important goal.

N. Chomsky’s proposals were intended to discover the mental realities underlying the way people use language: competence is seen as an aspect of our general psychological capacity. It is explicit. Competence is regarded as the system of rules and symbols that provides a formal representation of the underlying syntactic, semantic, and phonological structure of sentences. Linguistics was thus envisaged as a mentalistic discipline - a view that contrasted with the behavioural bias of previous 20^th –century work in the subject, and connected with the aims of several earlier linguists (such as Port-Royal grammarians). It was also argued that linguistics should not simply limit itself to the description of competence. In the long term, there was a still more powerful target: to provide a grammar capable of evaluating the adequacy of different accounts of competence, and of going beyond the study of individual languages to the nature of human language as a whole (by discovering “linguistic universals”). In this way it was hoped, linguistics would be able to make a contribution to our understanding of the nature of the human mind.

Since 1950s, much of linguistics has been taken up with proposals to develop the form of generative grammars, and the original theory has been reformulated several times. During the same period, also, there have been several proposals for alternative models of grammatical analysis to those expounded by Chomsky and his associates, some of which have attracted considerable support. As a consequence, linguistic theory, the core of scientific language study, is now lively and controversial field.

N. Chomsky’s ideas excited the whole generation of students; since American universities were expanding rapidly in the early 1960s, these students quickly found jobs and began developing the field, and within a few years Chomskyan linguistics has become a new orthodoxy in the USA. Before long, Chomsky’s ideas crossed the Atlantic and established themselves in Europe. Today they are still popular with the community of linguists all over the world.

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