GENERATIVE LINGUISTICS March 9, 2023 TOPIC OVERVIEW! 1 Introduction and Overview 3 Further Examples 2 Deep and Surface Structure 4 Discussion and Conclusion GENERATIVE LINGUISTICS • A broad concept in itself • A school of thought within Linguistics. • Makes use of the Concept of Generative Grammar • One great pro-pounder of this concept is Avram Noam Chomsky WHO IS NOAM CHOMSKY? • Born December 7, 1928, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. • In 1945, he began to study philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. • His book Syntactic Structures in 1957 brought together his linguistic ideas. GENERATIVE GRAMMAR • Chomsky’s concept of generative grammar implies a finite set of rules that can be applied to generate sentences, at the same time capable of producing infinite number of strings from the set rules. • “Grammar” is taken by linguists to encompass syntax and morphosyntax. The term may also be construed more broadly to include principles relating linguistic forms to the meanings they express and/or the sound patterns of languages. • The term “generative” is associated with the tradition of grammatical research initiated and inspired by the work of Noam Chomsky. • This term is sometimes construed very narrowly to refer only to work directly derivative from Chomsky’s. • Among Chomsky’s most important insights is the observation (noted independently over a century earlier by the great German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt). RULES OF GENERATIVE GRAMMAR • Prescriptive rules, as they prescribe how people should speak according to some standard. Examples: 1. “never end a sentence with a preposition”; 2. “use whom not who”; and 3. “don’t split infinitives”. • The other approach is to write rules that describe how people actually speak, whether or not they are speaking “correctly”. These are called descriptive rules. TRANSFORMATIONAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR • Transformational grammar is a theory of grammar that accounts for the constructions of a language by linguistic transformations and phrase structures that is also known as transformationalgenerative grammar or T-G or TGG. DEEP AND SURFACE STRUCTURE TWO LEVELS OF REPRESENTATION • Deep Structure (DS) represents syntactic relations (underlying representation). • Surface Structure (SS) derived (surface) representation of a Deep Structure. • SS can be derived from DS by transformations like passivation, forming of questions, etc. An Example of a Principle • Structure - dependency. • A principle common to all language. • Asserts that knowledge of language relies on the structural relationships in the sentence rather than on the sequence of words. Example: • The man who is tall is John. • Is the man who is tall John? • Is the man who tall is John? PARAMETERS • Languages differ! • One way in which they differ is in terms of the words they use. • Other differences between languages also have to be acquired. • Parameters select among possible variants. • Comparable to switches. General Ideas About Language • Chomsky distinguishes between Elanguage. • It aims to collect samples of data and then describe their property. • Constructs a grammar to describe the regularities I- language. •Concerned with what a speaker knows about language and where this knowledge comes. •Language is a system represented in the mind/brain of a particular individual (Chomsky, 1988). Syntax is More than Meaning • Well-formed sentence without meaning. • Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. • Syntax as well as meaning deprived of inner logic • Ideas furiously green colorless sleep. Creating a Grammar • How many sentences? Generative Grammar is a theory of competence: a model of the psychological system of unconscious knowledge that underlies a speaker's ability to produce and interpret utterances in a language. Conclusion and Discussion • The shift of focus from the dubious concept of an E-language to the significant notion of I-language was a crucial step in early generative grammar. (Chomsky, 1991) • Chomskys theories like UG aim at exploring the mind rather than the environment. Conclusion and Discussion • The generative approach offers a simple method to analyze and compare highly comlex structures and relations of languages. • Language is more than just a (generative) theory. March 9, 2023 Thank you!
