4 Grammatical theories

In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relevant to the construction and evaluation of grammatical theories. The first was the distinction between competence and performance. Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors (e.g. starting a sentence and then abandoning it midway through). He argued that these errors in linguistic performance were irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence (the knowledge which allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences). Consequentally, the linguist can study an idealised version of language, greatly simplifying linguistic analysis (see the "Grammaticalness" section below). The second idea related directly to the evaluation of theories of grammar. Chomsky made a distinction between grammars which achieved descriptive adequacy and those which went further and achieved explanatory adequacy. A descriptively adequate grammar for a particular language defines the (infinite) set of grammatical sentences in that language; that is, it describes the language in its entirity. A grammar which achieves explanatory adequacy has the additional property that it gives an insight into the underlying linguistic structures in the human mind; that is, it does not merely describe the grammar of a language, but makes predictions about how linguistic knowledge is mentally represented . For Chomsky, the nature of such mental representations is largely innate, so if a grammatical theory has explanatory adequacy it must be able to explain the various grammatical nuances of the languages of the world as relatively minor variations in the universal pattern of human language. Chomsky argued that, even though linguists were still a long way from constructing descriptively adequate grammars, progress in terms of descriptive adequacy would only come if linguists held explanatory adequacy as their goal. In other words, real insight into the structure of individual languages could only be gained through the comparative study of a wide range of languages, on the assumption that they are all cut from the same cloth.

5 "I-Language" and "E-Language"

In the 1980s, Chomsky proposed a distinction between I-Language and E-Language, similar but not identical to the competence/performance distinction. I-Language is taken to be the object of study in syntactic theory; it is the mentally represented linguistic knowledge which a native speaker of a language has, and is therefore a mental object — from this perspective, most of LinguisticsBroadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. The study of linguistics can be thought of along three major axes, the endpoints of which are described below: Synchronic and diachronic Sy is a branch of PsychologyPsychology is the study of mind, thought, and behaviour. It is largely concerned with humans, although the behaviour and thought of animals is also studied; either as a subject in its own right (see animal cognition), or more controversially, as a way of. E-Language encompasses all other notions of what a language is, for example that it is a body of knowledge or behavioural habits shared by a community. Chomsky argues that such notions of language are not useful in the study of innate linguistic knowledge, i.e. competence, even though they may seem sensible and intuitive, and are useful in other areas of study. Competence, he argues, can only be studied if languages are treated as mental objects.

6 "Grammaticalness"

Chomsky went against the prevailing viewpoint amongst linguists in the first half of the 20th Century by suggesting that the notions "grammatical" and "ungrammatical" could be defined in a meaningful and useful way. An extreme behaviorist linguist would argue that language can only be studied through recordings or transcriptions of actual speech, the role of the linguist being to look for patterns in such observed speech, but not to hypothesise about why such patterns might occur, nor to label particular utterances as either "grammatical" or "ungrammatical".

Chomsky argued that the intuition of a native speaker is enough to define the grammaticalness of a sentence; that is, if a particular string of English words elicits a double take, or feeling of wrongness in a native English speaker, it can be said that the string of words is ungrammatical. This is entirely distinct from the question of whether a sentence is meaningful, or can be understood. It is possible for a sentence to be both grammatical and meaningless, as in Chomsky's famous example "colourless green ideas sleep furiously". But such sentences manifest a linguistic problem distinct from that posed by meaningful but ungrammatical (non)-sentences such as "man the bit sandwich the", the meaning of which is fairly clear, but which no native speaker would accept as being well formed.

The use of such intuitive judgements freed syntacticians from studying language through a corpusIn law a corpus ( Latin: "body") is a set, a collection of documents and sources. See Corpus Juris Civilis. In linguistics, corpus (plural corpora is a large and structured set of texts (now usually electronically stored and processed). A corpus may conta of observed speech, since they were now able to study the grammatical properties of contrived sentences. Without this change in philosophy, the construction of generative grammars would have been almost impossible, since it is often the relatively obscure and rarely-used features of a language which give linguists clues about its structure, and it is very difficult to find good examples of such features in everyday speech.

7 Minimalism

Much current research in transformational grammar is inspired by Chomsky's Minimalist Program, outlined in his book The Minimalist Program (1995). The new research direction involves the further development of ideas involving economy of derivation and economy of representation which had started to become significant in the early 1990s, but were still rather peripheral aspects of TGG theory. Economy of derivation is a principle stating that movements (i.e. transformations) only occur in order to match interpretable features with uninterpretable features. An example of an interpretable feature is the plural inflectionThis article is about linguistics. For a mathematical meaning, see Stationary point. An Inflection or inflexion is a change of word form according to grammatical function, which occurs in inflected languages. Inflection is differentiated depending on the on regular English nouns, e.g. dogs. The word dogs can only be used to refer to several dogs, not a single dog, and so this inflection contributes to meaning, making it interpretable. English verbs are inflected according to the grammatical numberA number is an abstract entity used to describe quantity. There are different types of numbers. The most familiar numbers are the whole numbers {0, 1, 2,. denoted by W and the natural numbers {1, 2, 3,. used for counting and denoted by N . If the negative of their subject (e.g. "Dogs bite" vs "A dog bites"), but in most sentences this inflection just duplicates the information about number that the subject noun already has, and it is therefore uninterpretable. Economy of representation is the principle that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose, i.e. the structure of a sentence should be no larger or more complex than required to satisfy constraints on grammaticalness (note that this does not rule out complex sentences in general, only sentences which have superfluous elements in a narrow syntactic sense). Both notions, as described here, are somewhat vague, and indeed the precise formulation of these principles is a major area of controversy in current research. An additional aspect of minimalist thought is the idea that the derivation of syntactic structures should be uniform; that is, rules should not be stipulated as applying at arbitrary points in a derivation, but instead apply throughout derivations. For this reason, Deep Structure and Surface Structure are not present in Minimalist theories of syntax. Minimalism in the sense described here has no philosophical association with Minimalism, the artistic and cultural movement.

8 Mathematical representation

Returning to the more general mathematical notion of a grammar, an important feature of all transformational grammars is that they are more powerful than context free grammars. This idea was formalized by Chomsky in the Chomsky hierarchy. It is now generally accepted that it is impossible to describe the structure of natural languages using context free grammars (at least if these descriptions are to be judged on vaguely Chomskyan criteria).

9 Transformations

Some of the rules of Transformational-Generative Grammar are quite simple, such as the Head Initial/Final rules:

• Head Initial - the Head occurs before its argument.
  • ate an apple ( verb phrase)
  • destruction of the city ( noun phrase)
  • on the floor ( prepositional phrase)
• Head Final - the Head occurs after its argument.
  • boldly go ( verb phrase)
  • the big white house ( noun phrase)

Most languages tend to favor only one of these structures (there are exceptions). Japanese is a Head Final language, whereas English is a Head Initial language. Slightly more languages are Head Final.

Other rules are more complex, such as the so-called "Wh-Question Formation Rule" for English, which can be summarized as:

1. Begin with a simple declarative, with a missing item:

• He gave X a book.

2. Insert the appropriate Wh-word for the expected lexical category of the answer:

• He gave to whom a book.

3. Change the form of the verb to the appropriate "did X" construction:

• He did give to whom a book.

4. Use Subject-Auxiliary Inversion to form an interrogative:

• Did he give to whom a book?

5. Move the Wh-word element to the front of the sentence:

• To whom did he give a book?

While Chomsky and others have abandoned much of traditional TGG (the mechanisms described in the example above have been out of date since the late 1960s), it continues to have useful applications in syntactic analysis and the study of children's language acquisition.

10 See also

• Generalised Phrase Structure Grammar
• Head-driven phrase structure grammar
• Lexical Functional Grammar
• parasitic gap
• syntax

11 External links

The Syntax of Natural Language (an online textbook on transformational grammar).

Grammar

<Hide>