Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Development
1957 Syntacic Structures (generative component
of TGG) 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (transformational component of TGG : Standard Theory 1966 Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (freedom from instincts>; the creative aspect of language; unity of body and mind, language and thought; universality thesis) 1970s through 1980s Extended Standard Theory, Government Binding Theory 1990s P&P; Minimalism
Philosophical Background
From Decartes to Humboldt ( Enlightement to Romanticism) : from dualism to unity of mind/body Man vs Brute: mentalism vs mehanicism: criticism of behaviourism Freedom from instinct : allows for reasoning Universality The Port Royal Grammar : identity of mental processes and grammar Deep vs Surface Structure
Standard
The aim of linguistics is not only to provide a descriptive grammar of language, but also to provide an explanatory grammar It is not possible if the focus is on form and distribution only
It is necessary to take meaning into account
interpretation of the sentence; it is an abstract underlying structure that incorporates all the syntactic information required for the interpretation of a given sentence It represents an explicit description of sentence parts, regardless of whether those parts will appear in the surface structure or not; a structure that incorporates all the syntactic features of a sentence required to convert the sentence into a spoken or written version The level of surface structure represents the form of the sentence it takes either in speech or writing The two levels are related by sets of transformations, which link the deep with the surface structure of language
The term generative combines two senses (Lyons:1968:155) : 1) projective (predictive) and 2) explicit Projective / predictive sense: generative grammar attempts to define rules that can generate the infinite number of grammatical (wellformed) sentences possible in a language. Aim of grammar: to assign to each of an infinite range of sentences a structural description that indicates how a sentence is understood by the ideal speakerhearer. E.g. Grammar 1: S -> NP + Vtr + NP produces an infinite number of grammatical sentences, some of which may be
John loves Mary John detests sloppy housewives. Sloppy housewives hate house chores. Etc. ... Such a grammar establishes not only actual, but also potential sentences
down (rewritten as ->) into two constituent parts (syntactic categories) , namely phrasal categories (NP; VP, PrepP) and lexical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.)
NP N
Aux Pres V
VP NP NP N S
the meaning of the sentence is explicitly described , or, in Chomskys terms formalized Proposition = an afirmative statement which assigns a quality to an entity (here: games are dangerous)
FORMATIVES
The elements of deep structure, whose relation is explicitely described by means of PSR, are further assigned sets of featurs , which subcategorize the constituents of the deep structure: children +N + plural + count + animate + human
Terminal string
Apart from the PSRs and the formatives, the deep structure consists of the lexicon too, so at the very end of the phrase structure
The first TR is applied to the terminal string, which represents the STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION (BASE) The effect of the rule is a STRUCTURAL CHANGE, which becomes the structural description for the TR applied next Each rule makes an effect , i.e. a structure that differs from the previous one These middle structures are called TRANSFORMS
Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who know its (the speech community's) language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance. (Chomsky: 1965: 3)
Chomsky separates 'competence,' an idealized capacity, from the production of actual utterances, 'performance.' Additionally, competence, being an ideal, is located as a psychological or mental property or function . This is in contrast to performance, which refers to actual, real world linguistic output. This definition of linguistic competence has come to be associated with a rigid and narrowly defined concept of grammatical competence. Therefore, Hymes (1974) introduced the idea of 'communicative competence."
Generative grammars can only produce grammatical sentences; therefore, the speaker need not have special skills - a native
speaker automatically, intuitively recognizes a grammatical/ungrammatical sentence Very mentalistic !!! Some sentences are felt as grammatical, but nonsensical (Colourless green ideas...)
Language is creative
Reaction to mechaniscistic views of behaviourism (Chomsky vs. Sinner)
Language is not a mere response to the
outside stimuli; if it were so, we could only produce sentences that we had already been exposed to Creativity = ability to produce an infinite number of sentences using a limited set of rules and data
Recommended reading
Chomsky, N. (1957) Syntactic Structures. Mouton . The Hague
Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of
Syntax. MIT Press. Cambridge, Mass. James, C. ( 1980) Contrastive Analysis. Longman. London and New York. 27 60 orevi, R. (2002) Uvod u kontratsiranje jezika . Filoloki fakultet. Beograd. 21 39.