There is an old saying, If you stand for nothing, youll fall for everything.

How do you
decide whether the set of rules that youve proposed for some set of sentences in a language is
the right one, or the best one, given that there are an infinite set of possible grammatical
descriptions?

In formulating a grammar, or a set of rules that we assume models the language users
knowledge of language, we must first decide how we are going to evaluate the grammar that we
propose. Chomsky (1965) proposed three criteria of adequacy for a grammatical description,
which he dubbed:

(i) observational adequacy;

(ii) descriptive adequacy;
(iii) Explanatory adequacy.

I will now discuss these concepts.

A. Observational Adequacy
Linguists who formulate grammars of languages that are not their own, and who work
with native speakers of those languages, are called field linguists. They typically start by finding
out the words for various concepts in the target language, and eventually ask the speaker if (s)he
can put the words together in this way or that way to form an acceptable sentence in the
language. After collecting the responses for some time period (say, an hour-and-a half, for
example), the field linguist leaves and analyzes the responses, trying to figure out the rules that
generate all of the acceptable strings and none of the unacceptable strings. A set of rules, or
grammar, that achieves this, is said to be observationally adequate. Hence, observational
adequacy can be defined as follows:
Observational adequacy: the ability of a grammar to generate all and only the grammatical
sentences of a language in a fixed body of data (called a corpus).
B. Descriptive Adequacy
As we saw from the Jabberwocky example, natural languages are infinite, and hence a
grammar of a natural language must be able to generate an infinite number of sentences. To take
the example of the field linguist above, after the field linguist has formulated a grammar that is
observationally adequate, he tests the grammar against the native speakers intuitions by asking
 the native speaker if some further set of sentences that are not in the original corpus are
acceptable sentences in the language.
If a grammar generates all and only the set of grammatical sentences in the language, it is
said to be descriptively adequate.
Descriptive adequacy: the ability of a grammar to generate all and only the grammatical
sentences of the language.
However, we are not only interested in generating the right set of strings. Remember,
what we are really interested in modeling is the full set of abilities that native speakers have, and
one of those abilities is the ability to recognize the meanings of sentences. For example, we
know that The cat is on the mat does not mean that John saw Mary. We therefore have to build
in this ability as well. A traditional way of describing a grammar is as an infinite set of pairings
of form and meaning. Let us therefore revise our definitions of observational and descriptive
adequacy as follows:
Observational adequacy (Final Version): the ability of a grammar to generate all and
only the grammatical sentences of a language in a fixed body of data (called a corpus), and to
pair each grammatical sentence with its meaning.
Descriptive adequacy (Final Version): the ability of a grammar to generate all and only
the grammatical sentences of the language, and to pair each grammatical sentence with its
meaning.
C. Explanatory Adequacy:
The third requirement is not, strictly speaking, a requirement on grammars, but, rather, a
requirement on the account that underlies the construction of a particular grammar, i.e. an
account of what a possible grammar of a human language can be. This needs a little more
explanation.
When we formulate a grammar, we must have, at some level, a set of assumptions as to
what a possible grammar can be- there are certain possibilities for rules that dont even occur to
us. We therefore have, if only implicitly, a theory of possible grammars.
It is commonplace to view the task of a linguist, in discovering a descriptively adequate
grammar of a language, as being identical to the task of a child, who is trying to discover the
descriptively adequate (adult) grammar of the language of her or his community. Because
linguists are trying to model the abilities of native speakers, one of their goals is to try to
formulate this theory, called a theory of universal grammar, as well as the grammars of particular
languages. We would therefore say that the relation of the theory of grammar to grammars of
particular languages could be described as follows:

Theory of Grammar (Universal Grammar) = {G1,., Gn}

In other words, a theory of grammar is a specification of the possible grammars, which
were calling G1 through Gn (instead of French, English, Ewe, Chinese, etc.). Now, a theory of
grammar that is the correct account of what a possible grammar of a natural language should
predict only the set of actual possible grammars, and should not predict that some grammar is the
grammar of a natural language that is never realized in fact. In other words, a theory of grammar
should not over-predict.
There is a distinction between actual grammars of human languages and possible
grammars of human languages. As Chomsky & Halle put it in the preface to their classic work
in phonology, The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle (1968)), If a nuclear explosion
were to wipe out everybody on earth except for the inhabitants of Tanzania, we would not want
to say that pitch is a linguistic universal. (the assumption being that the language spoken in
Tanzania is what is known as a pitch-accent, or tone, language). External circumstances would
cause only one language to spoken in the world, the speakers of all of the others having been
wiped out by nuclear extinction, but the speakers of that language would have the capacity to
learn other languages that are not pitch-accent languages.
Remember, in constructing an account of what a possible human language is, we are
modeling actual human capacities, and the assumption is that humans will only consider a certain
set of grammars as possible grammars as human languages. Explanatory adequacy, therefore,
can be defined as a requirement that a theory of grammar only allow for the possible grammars
of human languages.
Explanatory Adequacy= the ability of a theory of grammar to predict only the set of
possible grammars of human languages.