2. GENERATIVE GRAMMAR
• The rules determining the structure and
interpretation of sentences that speakers
accept as belonging to the language.
THEORY OF COMPETENCE
• A model of psychological system of
unconscious knowledge that underlies a
speaker’s ability to produce and interpret
utterances in a language

3. Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky was born on the 7th of December 1928, in
Philadelphia. His father was a Hebrew grammarian and his mother a
teacher. Chomsky got his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania,
where he studied linguistics under Zellig Harris. He took a position in
machine translation and language teaching at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. Eventually his ideas about the structure of language
transformed the field of linguistics. Reviled by some and admired by
others, Chomsky’s ideas have laid the groundwork for the discipline of
linguistics, and have been very influential in computer science, and
philosophy.
Chomsky is also one of the leading intellectuals in the anarchist
socialist movement. His political writings about the media and political
injustice have profoundly influenced many. Chomsky is among the most
quoted authors in the world (among the top ten and the only living
person on the list).

4. Underlying thesis of
generative grammar
is that sentences
are generated by a subconscious
set of procedures (like computer
programs).

5. Do Rules Really
Exist?

6. Generative grammar
claims to be a theory
of cognitive
psychology, It is a
model of the
psychology of
Language.
descriptive rules
describe how people
prescriptive actually speak, whether
rules or not they are speaking
“correctly.”
“use whom not
who,”

7. Judgments as
Science?
Many linguists refer to the grammaticality judgment task as
“drawing upon our native speaker intuitions.”
Generative grammarian refers to “intuition” however, she is
using the term to mean “tapping into our subconscious
knowledge.”

8.  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 (grammaticality
intuitions). 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
recognize an utterance as grammatical, but not
a hypothesis about the processes involved in
either understanding or producing language.

9. Kinds of Grammaticality
Judgments
a) #The toothbrush is pregnant.
b) *Toothbrush the is blue.

10. Sentence (11a) sounds bizarre (cf. the toothbrush is blue) because
we know
that toothbrushes (except in the world of fantasy/science fiction
or poetry)
cannot be pregnant. The meaning of the sentence is strange, but
the form is
OK. We call this semantic ill-formedness and mark the sentence
with a #. By
contrast, we can glean the meaning of sentence (11b); it seems
semantically
reasonable (toothbrushes can be blue), but it is ill-formed from a
structural
point of view. That is, the determiner the is in the wrong place
in the sentence. This is a syntactically ill-formed sentence. A
native speaker
of English will judge both these sentences as ill-formed, but for
very different
reasons. In this text, we will be concerned primarily with syntactic
well-formedness.

11. The theory of WHERE DO THE
generative RULES COME
grammar FROM?
Learning vs. Acquisition
Innateness: Language as an Instinct
The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition

12. • Learning vs. Acquisition
• Cognitive scientists make a distinction in how we get conscious
• and subconscious knowledge.
• Subconscious knowledge, like how to speak
• or the ability to visually identify discrete objects, is acquired. In
part,
• this explains why classes in the formal grammar of a foreign
language
• often fail abysmally to train people to speak those languages
• Conscious knowledge (like the rules
• of algebra, syntactic theory, principles of organic chemistry,
or how to take
• apart a carburetor) is learned.

13.  the most controversial claim of Noam Chomsky’s is
that language is also an instinct. Many parts of
Language are built in, or innate.
 a human facility for Language (perhaps in the form
of a “Language organ” in the brain) is innate. We call
this facility Universal
Grammar (or UG).

14.  The argument presented here is based on an
unpublished paper by Alec Marantz,but is based
on an argument dating back to at least Chomsky
(1965).
 Premise (i): Syntax is a productive, recursive and
infinite system
 Premise (ii): Rule governed infinite systems are
unlearnable.
 Conclusion: Therefore syntax is an unlearnable
system. Since we have it,it follows that at least
parts of syntax are innate.

15. PREMISE (I): SYNTAX IS A PRODUCTIVE, PREMISE (II): RULE GOVERNED INFINITE
RECURSIVE AND INFINITE SYSTEM SYSTEMS ARE UNLEARNABLE.
 Language is a productive system.  premise (ii): The idea that infinite
That is, you can produce and systems are unlearnable. In order
understand sentences you have to make this more concrete, let’s
consider an algebraic treatment of
never heard before. a linguistic example. Imagine that
 The magic of syntax is that it can the task of a child is to determine
generate forms that have never the rules by which her language is
been produced before. Another constructed. Further, let’s simplify
example of the productive quality the task, and say a child simply has
lies what is called recursion. to match up situations
 It is always possible to embed a in the real world with utterances
she hears.4 So upon hearing the
sentence inside of a larger one. utterance the cat spots the kissing
This means that Language is a fishes, she identifies it with an
productive (probably infinite) appropriate situation in the context
system. around her .

16. A. Standard Theory (1957-1965)
B. Extended Standard Theory (1965-1973)
C. Revised Extended Standard Theory (1973-
1976)
D. Relational grammar (ca. 1975-1990)
E. Government and binding/Principles and
parameters theory (1981-1990)
F. Minimalist Program (1990-present)

17.  Major criticism of the Standard Theory came
from within generative grammar itself.
 Some of the Chomsky’s students felt that the
scope of grammar was too narrow and should
be extended into other areas of language,
particularly into semantics.

18. The major change in
the Extended Standard Theory was
that semantic interpretation could
not
be based on the deep structure
alone,
but that it is determined by the deep
structure as well as by the surface
structure.
However, the deep structure
keeps its important syntactic role.

19. Revised Extended Standard Theory (1973-1976)
Revised Extended Standard Theory
Is a strict delimitation of the
different
grammatical components, that
is syntax, semantics, as well as
phonology,
stylistics and pragmatics.

20. Relational
grammar (ca.
1975-1990)
An alternative model of
syntax based on the
idea that notions like
Subject, Direct Object,
and Indirect Object play
a primary role in
grammar.

21. Government and binding/Principles and
parameters theory (1981-1990)
It is based on the
principles
and parameters theory, It is the aim of GB-theory
which states
that there is a finite set of to find the
fundamental principles and parameters
principles common to all common
natural languages
and a finite set of binary to all languages so that the
parameters that syntax of a
determine the range particular language can be
of permissible variability
in language, explained
language acquisition and along these lines.
language
understanding.

22.  Binding theory poses locality
conditions on certain processes and
related items. The central notion of
government theory is the relation
between the head of a construction
and categories dependent on it.
 It is also concerned with relations of
anaphors, pronouns, names and
variables to possible antecedents.

23. an approach to
the study of the human
language faculty
chiefly associated with
Noam
Chomsky.
Minimalist Program
(1990-present)

24. In The Minimalist Program (1995),
the latest step in the continuous
development of transformational generative
grammar, Chomsky provided
a radically new approach to the
implementation of his underlying
ideas. The well-established concepts
of D-structure and S-structure have
been discarded as well as government,
the central element in GB-theory. Even
the ubiquitous phrase-structure rules
have been eliminated from the theory
to a large degree

25. The only conceptually
necessary categories left are
the
lexicon and the two levels of
phonetic
form and logical form* and it is
the
role of a grammar to map them
onto
each other.

26.  Is a formal system that describes a language
by specifying how any legal text can be
derived from a distinguished symbol called
the axiom, or sentence symbol. It consists of
a set of productions, each of which states
that a given symbol can be replaced by a
given sequence of symbols.

27.  Generative grammar has been used to a
limited extent in music theory and analysis since
the 1980s.[3][4] The most well-known
approaches were developed by Mark
Steedman[5] as well as Fred Lerdahl and Ray
Jackendoff,[6] who formalised and extended
ideas from Schenkerian analysis.[7] More
recently, such early generative approaches to
music were further developed and extended
by several scholars

28. End of my
report…Thank
you..

29. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/carnie/sa
mplechap/Carnie_chapter_1.pdf
www.mohamedrabeea.com/books/book1_10525.
pdf

30. Reported by:
LEILANI GRACE M. REYES
MELT 104: Grammatical Structure of English
Master in Education-Teaching English Language
2nd Trimester S.Y. 2012-2013