Linguistics is the study of language -- but there are many approaches to the study of language.

One might study language as a cultural phenomenon that binds people together or divides them, as a
tool for social interaction, or as an artistic medium. One might take a historical perspective and study
the familial relations among languages or how languages have changed over time.

There is also an approach which sees language as interesting because it is structured and accessible
product of the human mind. As such, language offers a means to study the nature of the mind that
produces it. This is the approach taken by the linguists in the Program in Linguistics at Princeton. More
specifically, our work is carried out within the framework of generative grammar. So...

What is generative grammar?

Linguists who work within the framework of generative grammar strive to develop a general theory that
reveals the rules and laws that govern the structure of particular languages, and the general laws and
principles governing all natural languages. The basic areas of study include phonology (the study of the
sound patterns of language), morphology (the study of the structure and meaning of words), syntax (the
study of the structure of sentences), and semantics (the study of linguistic meaning).

A signature feature of generative grammar is the view that humans have an innate "language faculty"
and that the universal principles of human language reflect intrinsic properties of this language faculty.
In learning their native languages, children acquire specific rules that determine the sound and meaning
of utterances in the language. These rules interact with each other in complex ways, and the entire
system is learned in a relatively short time and with little or no apparent conscious effort. The most
plausible explanation for the success of human language learners is that they have access to a highly
restrictive set of principles which does not require (or permit) them to consider many alternatives in
order to account for a particular construction, but instead limits them to a few possible rules from which
a choice can be made -- if necessary, without much further evidence. Since there is no evidence that the
principles that define the class of possible rules and systems of rules are learned, it is thought that these
principles serve as the preconditions for language learning, forming part of the innate capacity of every
normal child. Viewed in this light, the principles we are attempting to discover are part of the genetic
endowment of all humans. It follows that an understanding of these principles is necessary to an
understanding of the mental makeup of the human species.
Only after extensive parts of the grammars of different languages have been formulated is it possible to
ask questions concerning the ways in which various languages differ or the ways in which all languages
are the same. Consequently, a large part of our effort is devoted to the study of linguistic detail (for
example, the interpretation of English verb phrase ellipsis, the morpho-semantics of the Greek perfect,
the syntax of multiple questions, or prosodic phrasing in Korean). The ultimate goal is not merely to
understand these details, but to use them as a bridge to understanding the human language faculty in
general.

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Generative grammar

Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics

Phonetics

Phonology

Morphology

Syntax

Lexis

Semantics

Lexical semantics

Statistical semantics

Structural semantics

Prototype semantics

Pragmatics

Systemic functional linguistics

Applied linguistics
Language acquisition

Psycholinguistics

Sociolinguistics

Linguistic anthropology

Generative linguistics

Cognitive linguistics

Computational linguistics

Descriptive linguistics

Historical linguistics

Comparative linguistics

Etymology

Stylistics

Prescription

Corpus linguistics

List of linguists

Unsolved problems

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In linguistics, generative grammar generally refers to a proof-theoretical approach to the study of syntax
partially inspired by formal grammar theory and pioneered by Noam Chomsky. A generative grammar is
a set of rules that recursively "specify" or "generate" the well-formed expressions of a natural language.
This encompasses a large set of different approaches to grammar. The term generative grammar is also
broadly used to refer to the school of linguistics where this type of formal grammar plays a major part.

Generative grammar should be distinguished from traditional grammar, which is often strongly
prescriptive, rather than purely descriptive, is not mathematically explicit, and has historically
investigated a relatively narrow set of syntactic phenomena. In the "school of linguistics" sense it should
be distinguished from other linguistically descriptive approaches to grammar, such as various functional
theories.
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 decide 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.

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.

PSYCHOLOGY WIKI

PSYCHOLOGY WIKI

Generative grammar

Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics

Phonetics

Phonology

Morphology

Syntax

Lexis

Semantics

Lexical semantics
Statistical semantics

Structural semantics

Prototype semantics

Pragmatics

Systemic functional linguistics

Applied linguistics

Language acquisition

Psycholinguistics

Sociolinguistics

Linguistic anthropology

Generative linguistics

Cognitive linguistics

Computational linguistics

Descriptive linguistics

Historical linguistics

Comparative linguistics

Etymology

Stylistics

Prescription

Corpus linguistics

List of linguists

Unsolved problems

This box: view • talk • edit

In linguistics, generative grammar generally refers to a proof-theoretical approach to the study of syntax
partially inspired by formal grammar theory and pioneered by Noam Chomsky. A generative grammar is
a set of rules that recursively "specify" or "generate" the well-formed expressions of a natural language.
This encompasses a large set of different approaches to grammar. The term generative grammar is also
broadly used to refer to the school of linguistics where this type of formal grammar plays a major part.

Generative grammar should be distinguished from traditional grammar, which is often strongly
prescriptive, rather than purely descriptive, is not mathematically explicit, and has historically
investigated a relatively narrow set of syntactic phenomena. In the "school of linguistics" sense it should
be distinguished from other linguistically descriptive approaches to grammar, such as various functional
theories.

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 decide 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.

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.

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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. Linguists working in generative grammar
often view such derivation trees as a primary object of study. According to 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 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 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 has been used in music theory and analysis such as by Fred Lerdahl and in
Schenkerian analysis.
Automata theory: formal languages and formal grammars

Chomsky

hierarchy Grammars Languages Minimal

automaton

Type-0 Unrestricted Recursively enumerableTuring machine

n/a (no common name) Recursive Decider

Type-1 Context-sensitive Context-sensitive Linear-bounded

Type-2 Context-free Context-free Pushdown

Type-3 Regular Regular Finite