Generative grammar

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

In linguistics, and especially the study of syntax, generative grammar is the study of linguistic syntax using formal grammars that can in some sense "generate" the well-formed expressions of a natural language. By contrast, traditional grammar is not necessarily purely descriptive, is not mathematically explicit, and has historically investigated a relatively narrow set of syntactic phenomena.

The term generative grammar can also refer to a particular set of formal rules for a particular language; for example, one may speak of a generative grammar of English. A generative grammar in this sense is a formal device that can enumerate ("generate") all and only the grammatical sentences of a language. In an even narrower sense, a generative grammar is a formal device (or, equivalently, an algorithm) that can be used to decicde whether any given sentence is grammatical or not.

In most cases, a generative grammar is capable of generating an infinite number of strings from a finite set of rules. These properties are desirable for a model of natural language, since human brains are of finite capacity, yet humans can generate and understand a very large number of distinct sentences. Some linguists go so far as to claim that the set of grammatical sentences of any natural language is indeed infinite; however, this is not an empirically falsifiable claim.

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 languages are not adequate as models for human language, because all human languages allow the embedding of strings within strings in a 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. Linguistis working in generative grammar often view such derivation trees as a primary object of study. On 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:

                   S
                  /  \
                NP     VP
               / \     / \
              D   N   V   NP
             The dog ate  / \
                         D   N
                        the bone

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 a 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 described, 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 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

See also