Generative grammar

Last updated
A generative syntax tree in which the sentence S breaks down into a noun phrase NP and a verb phrase VP, both of which break down into additional smaller constituents. Cgisf-tgg.png
A generative syntax tree in which the sentence S breaks down into a noun phrase NP and a verb phrase VP, both of which break down into additional smaller constituents.

Generative grammar is a theoretical approach in linguistics that regards grammar as a domain-specific system of rules that generates all and only the grammatical sentences of a given language. In light of poverty of the stimulus arguments, grammar is regarded as being partly innate, the innate portion of the system being referred to as universal grammar. The generative approach has focused on the study of syntax while addressing other aspects of language including semantics, morphology, phonology, and psycholinguistics. [1] [2]

Contents

As a research tradition, generative grammar began in the late 1950s with the work of Noam Chomsky. [3] However, its roots include earlier structuralist approaches such as glossematics. [4] Early versions of Chomsky's approach to syntax were called transformational grammar, with subsequent variants known as the government and binding theory and the minimalist program. [5] [6] Recent work in generative-inspired biolinguistics has proposed that universal grammar consists solely of syntactic recursion, and that it arose recently in humans as the result of a random genetic mutation. [7]

Frameworks

There are a number of different approaches to generative grammar. Common to all is the effort to come up with a set of rules or principles that formally defines every one of the members of the set of well-formed expressions of a natural language. The term generative grammar has been associated with at least the following schools of linguistics:

Historical development of models of transformational grammar

Leonard Bloomfield, an influential linguist in the American Structuralist tradition, saw the ancient Indian grammarian Pāṇini as an antecedent of structuralism. [8] [9] However, in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax , Chomsky writes that "even Panini's grammar can be interpreted as a fragment of such a 'generative grammar'", [10] a view that he reiterated in an award acceptance speech delivered in India in 2001, where he claimed that "the first 'generative grammar' in something like the modern sense is Panini's grammar of Sanskrit". [11]

Military funding to generativist research was influential to its early success in the 1960s. [12]

Generative grammar has been under development since the mid-1950s, and has undergone many changes in the types of rules and representations that are used to predict grammaticality. In tracing the historical development of ideas within generative grammar, it is useful to refer to the various stages in the development of the theory:

Standard theory (1956–1965)

The standard theory of generative grammar corresponds to the original model of generative grammar laid out by Chomsky in 1965.

A core aspect of standard theory is the distinction between two different representations of a sentence, called deep structure and surface structure. The two representations are linked to each other by transformational grammar.

Extended standard theory (1965–1973)

The extended standard theory was formulated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Features are:

  • syntactic constraints
  • generalized phrase structures (X-bar theory)

Revised extended standard theory (1973–1976)

The revised extended standard theory was formulated between 1973 and 1976. It contains

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.

Government and binding/principles and parameters theory (1981–1990)

Chomsky's Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) and Barriers (1986).

Minimalist program (1990–present)

The minimalist program is a line of inquiry that hypothesizes that the human language faculty is optimal, containing only what is necessary to meet humans' physical and communicative needs, and seeks to identify the necessary properties of such a system. It was proposed by Chomsky in 1993. [13]

Context-free grammars

Generative grammars can be described and compared with the aid of the Chomsky hierarchy (proposed by 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 argues that these are not adequate as models for human language, because of the allowance of the center-embedding of strings within strings, in all natural human languages.

At a higher level of complexity are the context-free grammars (type 2). The derivation of a sentence by such a grammar can be depicted as a derivation tree. Linguists working within generative grammar often view such trees as a primary object of study. According to this view, a sentence is not merely a string of words. Instead, adjacent words are combined into constituents, which can then be further combined with other words or constituents to create a hierarchical tree-structure.

The derivation of a simple tree-structure for the sentence "the dog ate the bone" proceeds as follows. The determiner the and noun dog combine to create the noun phrase the dog. A second noun phrase the bone is created with determiner the and noun bone. The verb ate combines with the second noun phrase, the bone, to create the verb phrase ate the bone. Finally, the first noun phrase, the dog, combines with the verb phrase, ate the bone, to complete the sentence: the dog ate the bone. The following tree diagram illustrates this derivation and the resulting structure:

Basic english syntax tree.svg

Such a tree diagram is also called a phrase marker. They can be represented more conveniently in 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 ] ] ] ]

Chomsky has argued that phrase structure grammars are also inadequate for describing natural languages, and formulated the more complex system of transformational grammar. [14]

Evidentiality

Some linguists such as Geoffrey Pullum have questioned the empirical basis of poverty of the stimulus arguments, which motivate the crucial generative notion of universal grammar. [15] Linguistic studies had been made to prove that children have innate knowledge of grammar that they could not have learned. For example, it was shown that a child acquiring English knows how to differentiate between the place of the verb in main clauses from the place of the verb in relative clauses. In the experiment, children were asked to turn a declarative sentence with a relative clause into an interrogative sentence. Against the expectations of the researchers, the children did not move the verb in the relative clause to its sentence initial position, but to the main clause initial position, as is grammatical. [16] Critics however pointed out that this was not an evidence for the poverty of the stimulus because the underlying structures that children were proved to be able to manipulate were actually highly common in children's literature and everyday language. [15] This led to a heated debate which resulted in an increasing split between generative linguists and applied linguistics in the early 2000s. [17] [18]

The sentence from the study which shows that it is not the verb in the relative clause, but the verb in the main clause that raises to the head Cdeg. Verb Movement.jpg
The sentence from the study which shows that it is not the verb in the relative clause, but the verb in the main clause that raises to the head C°.

Recent arguments have been made that the success of large language models undermine key claims of generative syntax because they are based on markedly different assumptions, including gradient probability and memorized constructions, and out-perform generative theories both in syntactic structure and in integration with cognition and neuroscience. [20]

Generative-inspired biolinguistics has not uncovered any particular genes responsible for language. While some hopes were raised at the discovery of the FOXP2 gene, [21] [22] there is not enough support for the idea that it is 'the grammar gene' or that it had much to do with the relatively recent emergence of syntactical speech. [23]

Generativists also claim that language is placed inside its own mind module and that there is no interaction between first-language processing and other types of information processing, such as mathematics. [24] [lower-alpha 1] This claim is not based on research or the general scientific understanding of how the brain works. [25] [26]

Music

Generative grammar has been used in music theory and analysis since the 1980s. [27] [28] The most well-known approaches were developed by Mark Steedman [29] as well as Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, [30] who formalized and extended ideas from Schenkerian analysis. [31] More recently, such early generative approaches to music were further developed and extended by various scholars. [32] [33] [34] [35] [36]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Smith 2002, p. 17 "the mind itself is not an undifferentiated general-purpose machine: it is compartmentalized in such a way that different tasks are subserved by different mechanisms. The mind is "modular". Sight and smell, taste and touch, language and memory, are all distinct from each other, from our moral and social judgment, and from our expertise in music or mathematics."

Related Research Articles

In linguistics, syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.

A syntactic category is a syntactic unit that theories of syntax assume. Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech, are syntactic categories. In phrase structure grammars, the phrasal categories are also syntactic categories. Dependency grammars, however, do not acknowledge phrasal categories.

Phrase structure rules are a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language's syntax and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957. They are used to break down a natural language sentence into its constituent parts, also known as syntactic categories, including both lexical categories and phrasal categories. A grammar that uses phrase structure rules is a type of phrase structure grammar. Phrase structure rules as they are commonly employed operate according to the constituency relation, and a grammar that employs phrase structure rules is therefore a constituency grammar; as such, it stands in contrast to dependency grammars, which are based on the dependency relation.

In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations to produce new sentences from existing ones.

A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Parse tree</span> Tree in formal language theory

A parse tree or parsing tree or derivation tree or concrete syntax tree is an ordered, rooted tree that represents the syntactic structure of a string according to some context-free grammar. The term parse tree itself is used primarily in computational linguistics; in theoretical syntax, the term syntax tree is more common.

In linguistics, X-bar theory is a model of phrase-structure grammar and a theory of syntactic category formation that was first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1970 reformulating the ideas of Zellig Harris (1951), and further developed by Ray Jackendoff, along the lines of the theory of generative grammar put forth in the 1950s by Chomsky. It attempts to capture the structure of phrasal categories with a single uniform structure called the X-bar schema, basing itself on the assumption that any phrase in natural language is an XP that is headed by a given syntactic category X. It played a significant role in resolving issues that phrase structure rules had, representative of which is the proliferation of grammatical rules, which is against the thesis of generative grammar.

In linguistics, the minimalist program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky.

Theta roles are the names of the participant roles associated with a predicate: the predicate may be a verb, an adjective, a preposition, or a noun. If an object is in motion or in a steady state as the speakers perceives the state, or it is the topic of discussion, it is called a theme. The participant is usually said to be an argument of the predicate. In generative grammar, a theta role or θ-role is the formal device for representing syntactic argument structure—the number and type of noun phrases—required syntactically by a particular verb. For example, the verb put requires three arguments.

In linguistics, branching refers to the shape of the parse trees that represent the structure of sentences. Assuming that the language is being written or transcribed from left to right, parse trees that grow down and to the right are right-branching, and parse trees that grow down and to the left are left-branching. The direction of branching reflects the position of heads in phrases, and in this regard, right-branching structures are head-initial, whereas left-branching structures are head-final. English has both right-branching (head-initial) and left-branching (head-final) structures, although it is more right-branching than left-branching. Some languages such as Japanese and Turkish are almost fully left-branching (head-final). Some languages are mostly right-branching (head-initial).

The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by Noam Chomsky as the term for grammar studied previously by Emil Post and Axel Thue. Some authors, however, reserve the term for more restricted grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy: context-sensitive grammars or context-free grammars. In a broader sense, phrase structure grammars are also known as constituency grammars. The defining trait of phrase structure grammars is thus their adherence to the constituency relation, as opposed to the dependency relation of dependency grammars.

Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles and specific parameters that for particular languages are either turned on or off. For example, the position of heads in phrases is determined by a parameter. Whether a language is head-initial or head-final is regarded as a parameter which is either on or off for particular languages. Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik. Many linguists have worked within this framework, and for a period of time it was considered the dominant form of mainstream generative linguistics.

In linguistics, the projection principle is a stipulation proposed by Noam Chomsky as part of the phrase structure component of generative-transformational grammar. The projection principle is used in the derivation of phrases under the auspices of the principles and parameters theory.

In generative grammar and related approaches, the logical form (LF) of a linguistic expression is the variant of its syntactic structure which undergoes semantic interpretation. It is distinguished from phonetic form, the structure which corresponds to a sentence's pronunciation. These separate representations are postulated in order to explain the ways in which an expression's meaning can be partially independent of its pronunciation, e.g. scope ambiguities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biolinguistics</span> Study of the biology and evolution of language

Biolinguistics can be defined as the study of biology and the evolution of language. It is highly interdisciplinary as it is related to various fields such as biology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, mathematics, and neurolinguistics to explain the formation of language. It seeks to yield a framework by which we can understand the fundamentals of the faculty of language. This field was first introduced by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona. It was first introduced in 1971, at an international meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In certain theories of linguistics, thematic relations, also known as semantic roles, are the various roles that a noun phrase may play with respect to the action or state described by a governing verb, commonly the sentence's main verb. For example, in the sentence "Susan ate an apple", Susan is the doer of the eating, so she is an agent; an apple is the item that is eaten, so it is a patient.

Merge is one of the basic operations in the Minimalist Program, a leading approach to generative syntax, when two syntactic objects are combined to form a new syntactic unit. Merge also has the property of recursion in that it may be applied to its own output: the objects combined by Merge are either lexical items or sets that were themselves formed by Merge. This recursive property of Merge has been claimed to be a fundamental characteristic that distinguishes language from other cognitive faculties. As Noam Chomsky (1999) puts it, Merge is "an indispensable operation of a recursive system ... which takes two syntactic objects A and B and forms the new object G={A,B}" (p. 2).

<i>Aspects of the Theory of Syntax</i> 1965 book by Noam Chomsky

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax is a book on linguistics written by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1965. In Aspects, Chomsky presented a deeper, more extensive reformulation of transformational generative grammar (TGG), a new kind of syntactic theory that he had introduced in the 1950s with the publication of his first book, Syntactic Structures. Aspects is widely considered to be the foundational document and a proper book-length articulation of Chomskyan theoretical framework of linguistics. It presented Chomsky's epistemological assumptions with a view to establishing linguistic theory-making as a formal discipline comparable to physical sciences, i.e. a domain of inquiry well-defined in its nature and scope. From a philosophical perspective, it directed mainstream linguistic research away from behaviorism, constructivism, empiricism and structuralism and towards mentalism, nativism, rationalism and generativism, respectively, taking as its main object of study the abstract, inner workings of the human mind related to language acquisition and production.

The lexicalist hypothesis is a hypothesis proposed by Noam Chomsky in which he claims that syntactic transformations only can operate on syntactic constituents. It says that the system of grammar that assembles words is separate and different from the system of grammar that assembles phrases out of words.

In formal syntax, a node is a point in a tree diagram or syntactic tree that can be assigned a syntactic category label.

References

  1. ↑ Wasow, Thomas (2003). "Generative Grammar" (PDF). In Aronoff, Mark; Ress-Miller, Janie (eds.). The Handbook of Linguistics. Wiley Blackwell.
  2. ↑ Carnie, Andrew (2002). Syntax: A Generative Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 3–20. ISBN   978-0-631-22543-0.
  3. ↑ "Tool Module: Chomsky's Universal Grammar". thebrain.mcgill.ca. Retrieved 2017-08-28.
  4. ↑ Koerner, E. F. K. (1978). "Towards a historiography of linguistics". Toward a Historiography of Linguistics: Selected Essays. John Benjamins. pp. 21–54.
  5. ↑ "Tool Module: Chomsky's Universal Grammar". thebrain.mcgill.ca. Retrieved 2017-08-28.
  6. ↑ "Mod 4 Lesson 4.2.3 Generative-Transformational Grammar Theory". www2.leeward.hawaii.edu. Retrieved 2017-02-02.
  7. ↑ Berwick, Robert C.; Chomsky, Noam (2015). Why Only Us: Language and Evolution. MIT Press. ISBN   9780262034241.
  8. ↑ Bloomfield, Leonard, 1929, 274; cited in Rogers, David, 1987, 88
  9. ↑ Hockett, Charles, 1987, 41
  10. ↑ Chomsky, Noam (2015). Aspects of the theory of syntax. The MIT Press. pp. v. ISBN   978-0-262-52740-8. OCLC   1055331632.
  11. ↑ "Understanding human language". frontline.thehindu.com. 7 December 2001. Retrieved 24 July 2022.
  12. ↑ Newmeyer, F. J. (1986). Has there been a 'Chomskyan revolution' in linguistics?. Language, 62(1), p.13
  13. ↑ Chomsky, Noam. 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. MIT occasional papers in linguistics no. 1. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Distributed by MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
  14. ↑ Chomsky, Noam (1956). "Three models for the description of language" (PDF). IRE Transactions on Information Theory. 2 (3): 113–124. doi:10.1109/TIT.1956.1056813. S2CID   19519474. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-09-19.
  15. 1 2 Pullum, GK; Scholz, BC (2002). "Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments" (PDF). The Linguistic Review. 18 (1–2): 9–50. doi:10.1515/tlir.19.1-2.9. S2CID   143735248 . Retrieved 2020-02-28.
  16. ↑ Pinker, Steven (2007). The language instinct: The new science of language and mind. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. ISBN   9780061336461.
  17. ↑ Fernald, Anne; Marchman, Virginia A. (2006). "27: Language learning in infancy". In Traxler and Gernsbacher (ed.). Handbook of Psycholinguistics. Academic Press. pp. 1027–1071. ISBN   9780080466415.
  18. ↑ de Bot, Kees (2015). A History of Applied Linguistics: From 1980 to the Present. Routledge. ISBN   9781138820654.
  19. ↑ Christensen, Christian Hejlesen. "Arguments for and against the Idea of Universal Grammar". Leviathan: Interdisciplinary Journal in English, 2018: 12–28.
  20. ↑ Piantadosi, S (2023). "Modern Language Models Refute Chomsky's Approach to Language". Lingbuzz. Retrieved 2023-03-15.
  21. ↑ Scharff C, Haesler S (December 2005). "An evolutionary perspective on FoxP2: strictly for the birds?". Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 15 (6): 694–703. doi:10.1016/j.conb.2005.10.004. PMID   16266802. S2CID   11350165.
  22. ↑ Scharff C, Petri J (July 2011). "Evo-devo, deep homology and FoxP2: implications for the evolution of speech and language". Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 366 (1574): 2124–40. doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0001. PMC   3130369 . PMID   21690130.
  23. ↑ Diller, Karl C.; Cann, Rebecca L. (2009). Rudolf Botha; Chris Knight (eds.). Evidence Against a Genetic-Based Revolution in Language 50,000 Years Ago. Oxford Series in the Evolution of Language. Oxford.: Oxford University Press. pp. 135–149. ISBN   978-0-19-954586-5. OCLC   804498749.{{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  24. ↑ Smith, Neil (2002). Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN   0-521-47517-1.
  25. ↑ Schwarz-Friesel, Monika (2012). "On the status of external evidence in the theories of cognitive linguistics". Language Sciences. 34 (6): 656–664. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2012.04.007.
  26. ↑ Elsabbagh, Mayada; Karmiloff-Smith, Annette (2005). "Modularity of mind and language". In Brown, Keith (ed.). Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (PDF). Elsevier. ISBN   9780080547848 . Retrieved 2020-03-05.
  27. ↑ Baroni, M., Maguire, S., and Drabkin, W. (1983). The Concept of Musical Grammar. Music Analysis, 2:175–208.
  28. ↑ Baroni, M. and Callegari, L. (1982) Eds., Musical grammars and computer analysis. Leo S. Olschki Editore: Firenze, 201–218.
  29. ↑ Steedman, M.J. (1989). "A Generative Grammar for Jazz Chord Sequences". Music Perception. 2 (1): 52–77. doi:10.2307/40285282. JSTOR   40285282.
  30. ↑ Lerdahl, Fred; Ray Jackendoff (1996). A Generative Theory of Tonal Music . Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN   978-0-262-62107-6.
  31. ↑ Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition. (Der Freie Satz) translated and edited by Ernst Ostler. New York: Longman, 1979.
  32. ↑ Tangian, Andranik (1999). "Towards a generative theory of interpretation for performance modeling". Musicae Scientiae. 3 (2): 237–267. doi:10.1177/102986499900300205. S2CID   145716284.
  33. ↑ Tojo, O. Y. & Nishida, M. (2006). Analysis of chord progression by HPSG. In Proceedings of the 24th IASTED international conference on Artificial intelligence and applications, 305–310.
  34. ↑ Rohrmeier, Martin (2007). A generative grammar approach to diatonic harmonic structure. In Spyridis, Georgaki, Kouroupetroglou, Anagnostopoulou (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 97–100. http://smc07.uoa.gr/SMC07%20Proceedings/SMC07%20Paper%2015.pdf
  35. ↑ Giblin, Iain (2008). Music and the generative enterprise. Doctoral dissertation. University of New South Wales.
  36. ↑ Katz, Jonah; David Pesetsky (2009) "The Identity Thesis for Language and Music". http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000959

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.