In

the name of ALLAH

WHO is most merciful
and gracious
The University Of Education
(LMC)
Presentation and
assignment,assingned by;
Dr.Tayba yasmin

GENERATIVISM
By:Abdullah kakar
 Outline

1. Noam Chomsky
 1- Definition of Generativism
 2- Reasons for the rise of generativism
 3- Principles of genrativism
– Generativist view of language – Main
concepts of generativism
 4- Generativism and language teaching
 5- Evolution of Genrativism
 Noam Chomsky
 Noam Chomsky
 • Avram Noam Chomsky
 • He was born on 12/7/1928.
 • He is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist and
 political activist.
 • It is no one but Noam Chomsky who is credited with the
.
 development of Generativism.
 • He being a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist and political
 activist, has a significant impact on the intellectual community of
 ours since the mid of 20th century.
 • He developed the theories of generative grammar, and it is he who
 is the critique of behaviourism .(B.F. Skinner).
 • His contributions so great that he is called the father of modern
 linguistics.
Generativism: (definitions)

Generativism (definitions • theory of language that has been

developed in the 1950s by Noam Chomsky and his disciples.
• It implies the usefulness and feasibility of describing the human
language by means of generative grammars ( Lyons, 1981).
• It also refers to the approach of language analysis based on such
types of grammar.
• A ‘generative’ grammar is the type of grammar whose rules
generate (i.e., produce) all and only the correct combinations of
elements in a language (Trask, 2007) • It also refers to a conceptual
model whose central tenet is that language is a property for which
human beings are biologically prewired.
Reasons for the rise of Generativism

• Generativism had its origins in the 1950s with the publication

of Noam Chomsky’s 1957 book Syntactic structures.
• Chomsky’s approach was a reaction to the behaviorist theory of
language prevalent at the time (structuralism), championed by
the psychologist Skinner.
– For behaviourists, the brain is considered a blank slate with
regard to linguistic knowledge;
– children must be explicitly taught their language by the adults
around them in a stimulus–response manner, – behavior is
rewarded when chidren imitate the adults’ language correctly.
Generativist view of language

• language is a species-specific property – part of the mind/brain.

• Children are born with a faculty of language in its Initial State –
i,e. The state of the faculty of language before it is exposed to
the input of a particular language.
– innate knowledge : Universal Grammar.
 • Language is a human faculty – It is part of the human
biological endowment – thanks to the faculty of language, any
speaker of a language is believed to internalize a system of
rules in a particular way.
Main concepts and principles of
Generativism

• Competence: linguistic competence is ‘the speaker-hearer’s

knowledge of his language’ (1965a:4). It is also our ability to use
language. It is a set of rules constructed in the speakers’ minds by
virtue of language acquisition.
• Performance: ‘the actual use of language in concrete situations’. It is
also defined as the real utterances produced by real people • Universal
Grammar: the grammatical properties shared by all human languages.
 • I-language: a set of rules and principles internalized in the minds of
speakers • E-language: a set of possible sentences that can be
externalized in society
Innateness

The innateness hypothesis asserts that language ability is innate in humans.

Humans are genetically predisposed to acquire and use language. This principle
claims that babies are born with knowledge that languages have patterns and
with the ability to seek out and identify those patterns. The main arguments in
favor of innateness hypothesis are:  Language acquisition would be difficult or
even impossible without an innate grammar.
 The mere existence of language universals supports the hypothesis that
language is innate.
  All humans acquire language and no other animals.
Poverty of the stimulus

It is the main problem that led Chomsky to his innateness hypothesis.

Chomsky’s main question was: “how anyone can know fairly much although he
had little contact to the outside world”. To make up for the lack of stimulus, a
human being, according to Chomsky, must have another mechanism of learning,
specifically of acquiring the language, than simply by stimulus from the outside.
Chomsky made up the claim that “a child is born with an innate capacity for
language development, that the human being is in some way pre-constructed
towards the development of language; so, when the child is exposed to
language, certain language structuring principles automatically commence to
operate”
 Transformational generative grammar
Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) refers to a theory of generative
grammar that aims to understand the processing of grammatical knowledge in the
human brain. TGG is best explained by considering the two key words in the string.
There are:
transformational and generative.
“Transformational” is an adjectival derivation from the noun transformation.
Transformation in this sense refers to a device or a process of changing the form of
one linguistic structure to another. “Generative” on the other hand is an adjective
formed from the verb “to generate”. It means to describe. When it is said that a
rule generates a sentence, what this means in transformational grammar is that, a
particular rule or set of rules describe how a particular linguistic element or string is
formed.
1. Transformational generative grammar is a form of language analysis that is
established with the different elements in the sentence of a language and makes
use of rules of transformations to recognize these relationships.
 Transformational grammar structure rules
This is the second level of transformational grammar and the level in which
transformational rules operate in reality. Transformational rules operate on the
strings produced by the phrase structure component and altered then in various
ways (by turning active string into passive one, by altering word order, by adding
inflections and so on) making various relationship between different types of
sentences explicit (Adetuyi & Olusola, 2015) . Example: Passive transformations:
alters the order of elements in active sentence and adds three further elements:
 a form of the verb `be’ in the appropriate tense;
 a particle `by’ to indicate the agent following,  a past particle affix,
symbolized as – en, attached to main verb).
(The boy) (will kick) (the ball) (The ball) (will be kicked) (by) (the boy).
 (NP1) + (Aux + Verb) + (NP2) (NP2) +(Aux + be +V) + (by) + (NP1)
 Continued
universal grammar..
 • If we look at linguistics, it is connected to psychoanalytic which
means psyche and psyche means mind. So language acquisition is one of
the most important functions that our mind performs. There have been
studies and linguists are curious to know that how human beings acquire
language and how they use it in their day to day communication. Old
schools of thought Believed that a child is born with a clean slate
(tabula Rasa) which means that the child has no language and he or it
can acquire language from his environment, but Noam Chomsky was the
first person who said that human mind is pre-wired with some basic
rules of Language. It means that when a child is born, he already has a
basic set of language skills and knowledge of grammar and his mind is
not empty. He(the child) has language acquisition device (lad) in his
brain due to which he is able to learn language
 LAD
m Chomsky says that when a child is interacting with parents, peers and friends,
s acquiring language but not the grammar, only vocabulary’ because grammar
e thing that he knows already. Apart from this, another important point to
ce that if we look at all the languages in the world, we will find out that all
uages have their basic structures and they are the same. For example all
uages have nouns, adjectives and adverbs which means all the languages
w the same system and structures which make it universal grammar.
D_ Language acquisition device.
oam Chomsky pointed out poverty of stimulus for the acquisition of language.
s against stimulus play vital role in language learning. • He held hypothesis
language is free from stimulus control. Also he believes that human language
nate and pre-wired in human brain. He says that a child acquires language in
e years. • Language acquisition device is a prime source of learning language.
Generativism and language acquistion

The generative approach as subscribed to by many linguists,

views linguistic knowledge as being unique and specialized, and
stemming from brain structures devoted specifically to the
processing of language.
 • Under a generative approach, human beings are assumed to
be prewired for language, beginning life not with a blank slate
but rather with a linguistic template or blueprint that they
flesh out upon exposure to specific linguistic data. Instead of
learning language by imitating those around them, children
create their own grammars.
Generativism and language acquistion

• children make errors that adults do not (e.g. ‘I hurted

myself’) and generate novel forms, neither of which should
occur if they learned solely by imitating.
 • most children are not given explicit instruction in their
language • although the environments in which children
acquire their language vary, they all go through similar
stages in acquiring a language and during the same general
time • although children do not hear examples of every
possible structural pattern, they nonetheless attain a
grammar capable of generating all the possible sentences in
their language (poverty of the stimulus).
Developments of Generativism

• The Classical Theory aims to make linguistics a science. Syntactic Structures. 1957.
• The Standard Theory deals with how semantics should be studied in a linguistics
theory. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. 1965.
• The Extended Standard Theory focuses discussion on language universals and
universal grammar.
• The Revised Extended Standard Theory (or GB) focuses discussion on government
and binding.
“Remarks on Nominalization” (1970), Reflections on Language (1975), Rules and
Representations(1980), Lectures on Government and Binding (1981).
• The latest is the Minimalist Program, a further revision of the previous theory.
 - The Minimalist Program (1995), Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework (1998).
Conclusion

• In conclusion, it can be summarized that Noam Chomsky goes against

behaviorism which says that children learn from environment.
1. Noam Chomsky, in contrast says that children learn vocabulary but not the
grammar. Because he already knows the grammar. He learns vocabulary to
strengthen his language. Otherwise, grammar is the thing, he knows already.
2. He say mind is not a blank sheet at the time of birth. Every child knows basic
grammatical roles.(not tabula Rasa)
3. All Languages follow the same grammatical structures. For instance, every
language has verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
4. Language is all about well-formed sentences not ill-formed sentences. We
can create infinite well-formed sentences but are wanting in creating
ill-formed sentences.