Generativism

Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics and it has been

developed by the American linguist Noam Chomsky in the 1950s. Chomsky and his
followers challenged previous assumptions about language structure and language
learning, taking the position that language is creative (not memorized), and rule
governed (not based on habit), and that universal phenomena of the human mind
underlie all language.

The basis to Chomsky's linguistic theory is that the principles underlying the
structure of language are biologically determined in the human mind and hence
genetically transmitted. He therefore argues that all humans share the same
underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of socio-cultural difference. In this he
opposes the radical behaviourist psychology of B.F. Skinner, instead arguing that
human language is unlike modes of communication used by any other animal
species.

Chomsky built on earlier work of Zellig Harris to formulate the generative theory of
language. According to this theory the most basic form of language is a set of
syntactic rules universal for all humans and underlying the grammars of all human
languages. This set of rules is called Universal Grammar, and for Chomsky
describing it is the primary objective of the discipline of linguistics.

Early versions of this Chomsky's theory were called transformational grammar

which was associated with a distinction between the "deep structure" and "surface
structure" of sentences. The deep structure represented the core semantic
relations of a sentence, and was mapped on to the surface structure (which followed
the phonological form of the sentence very closely) via transformations. Chomsky
believed there are considerable similarities between languages' deep structures,
and that these structures reveal properties, common to all languages that surface
structures conceal.

Generative grammar

The generative linguistics makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. A

generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly
predict which combinations of words will form or generate grammatical sentences.

Chomsky has argued that many of the properties of a generative grammar arise
from an "innate" universal grammar. Proponents of generative grammar have
argued that most grammar is not the result of communicative function and is not
simply learned from the environment. In this respect, generative grammar takes a
point of view different from cognitive grammar, functional, and behaviorist theories.
. From Chomsky's perspective, the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal
Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages
in so little time.
Most versions of generative grammar characterize sentences as
either grammatically correct (also known as well formed) or not. The rules of a
generative grammar typically function as an algorithm to predict grammaticality as
a discrete (yes-or-no) result.

Chomsky and other generativists have demonstrated that every native speaker of a
language has an internal grammar that allows them to instinctively know what is a
possible sentence in their language and what is not, and to only speak or write in a
way that fits this grammar. This means that a native speaker cannot use their
language in a wrong way. To demonstrate, here is a grammatical English sentence:

(1) I used to write on my blog, but now I rarely do.

This is not a grammatical sentence of English:
(2) I wroted on-blog-a-mine, now-but I not-much does,
nor is this:
(3) I on my blog to write used, but now do I rarely,
and of course not this:
(4) Kcha plip plip blugu, muppu muppu fla gen.
There are, of course, different ways in English to express the thought behind
sentence (1), such as this:
(5) I dont write on my blog as much as I used to.

But for some reason, (2), (3) and (4) are not utterances that an English speaker
would produce in place of (1) or (5). These example sentences would look very
different in another language, but there would always be sentences that are part of
the language and possible sentences that are not. Generative grammar theory tries
to figure out how this works, how native speakers structure language.

Perhaps Chomskys most influential and time-tested contribution to the field is the
claim that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for
the "productivity" or "creativity" of language. In other words, a formal grammar of a
language can explain the ability of a hearer-speaker to produce and interpret an
infinite number of utterances, including novel ones, with a limited set of
grammatical rules and a finite set of terms.

The aim of the linguistic theory expounded by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures

(1957) was essentially to describe syntax, that is, to specify the grammatical rules
underlying the construction of sentences. In Chomsky's mature theory, as
expounded in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), the aims become more
ambitious: to explain all of the linguistic relationships between the sound system
and the meaning system of the language. To achieve this, the complete "grammar"
of a language, in Chomsky's technical sense of the word, must have three parts, a
syntactical component that generates and describes the internal structure of the
infinite number of sentences of the language, a phonological component that
describes the sound structure of the sentences generated by the syntactical
component, and a semantic component that describes the meaning structure of the
sentences. The heart of the grammar is the syntax;

The first task of Chomsky's syntax is to account for the speaker's understanding of
the internal structure of sentences. Sentences are not unordered strings of words,
rather the words and morphemes are grouped into functional constituents such as
the subject of the sentence, the predicate, the direct object, and so on. Chomsky
and other grammarians can represent much, though not all, of the speaker's
knowledge of the internal structure of sentences with rules called "phrase structure"
rules.

The rules themselves are simple enough to understand. For example, the fact that a
sentence (S) can consist of a noun phrase (NP) followed by a verb phrase (VP) we
can represent in a rule of the form: S - NP + VP. The so-called rewrite rules tell us
that the initial symbol S can be replaced by NP + VP. Other rules will similarly
unpack NP and VP into their constituents. In a very simple grammar, a noun phrase
might consist of an article (Art) followed by a noun (N); and a verb phrase might
consist of an auxiliary verb (Aux), a main verb (V), and a noun phrase (NP). A very
simple grammar of a fragment of English, then, might look like this:

1. S - NP + VP

2. NP - Art + N

3. VP - Aux + V + NP

4. Aux - (can, may, will, must, etc.)

5. V - (read, hit, eat, etc.)

6. Art - (a, the)

7. N - (boy, man, book, etc.)

If we keep applying the rewrite rules to generate strings until we have no elements
in our strings that occur on the left-hand side of a rewrite rule, we have arrived at a
"terminal string." For example, starting with S and rewriting according to the rules
mentioned above, we might construct the following simple derivation of the
terminal string underlying the sentence "The boy will read the book":

NP + VP (by rule 1)
Art + N + VP (by rule 2)

Art + N + Aux + V + NP (by rule 3)

Art + N + Aux + V + Art + N

(by rule 2)

the + boy + will + read + the + book

(by rules 4, 5, 6, and 7)

The information contained in this derivation can be represented graphically in a tree

diagram of the following form:

This "phrase marker" is Chomsky's representation of the syntax of the sentence

"The boy will read the book." It provides a description of the syntactical structure of
the sentence.

Criticism

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. 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 recognize
an utterance as grammatical, but not a hypothesis about the processes involved in
either understanding or producing language.
Development of the generative linguistics
In the 60s, the generative grammar became one of the central disciplines of the
modern linguistics. This method was also used in semantics and morphology, and
the first to introduce it in the phonological description of language was American
linguist Morris Halle.

In the past 50 years many followers of Chomsky gave their own theories, and even
Chomsky himself changed and improved his original ideas.
The whole development of the generative grammar insured the close connection
between the semantic and syntactic studies nowadays.

Chomskys generative linguistics is widely accepted in other countries outside the

United States.