Page 354 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes The explicitness and the predictive nature of such a grammar can be summed up in one word, the
word generative. But the term generative should not automatically lead to conclude that all generative
grammars are transformational. Any type of grammar which is explicit and predictive is generative.
But not all generative grammars are transformational.
The Goals of Linguistic Theory and the Concept of Grammar
Between 1933 and 1957 the structuralists were largely concerned with the problem of how to
DISCOVER the phonemes, morphemes, etc. of the language. They also believed that in the interest of
‘empirical’, ‘scientific’ linguistics we must begin with the observed data and work ‘upwards’ from
the sound system to the grammatical system, keeping the two in their right place in the sequence and
completely apart. The sound system had to come first because it was felt that only the phonetic/
phonemic aspects of language provided a basis for scientific statement, since meaning was outside
the possibility of serious investigation. So what linguistic theory had to provide, was only a set of
‘discovery procedures’—procedures for discovering the structure of the language.
So at that time, a grammar could be defined as a perfect, objective description of a language. And the
ultimate goal of linguistics was to find rules which led to such grammars. Chomsky suggested, on
the other hand, that this aim was both far too ambitious and far too limited in scope. It was too
ambitious in that it was unrealistic to expect a perfect grammar from a mass of data. It was too
limited because such grammars had no predictive power. They catalogued what had happened, but
did not predict what would happen.
Chomsky suggested that a grammar should be regarded, instead, as a theory or hypothesis about
how a language worked. In the same way as a biochemist might formulate a hypothesis against
actual living cells, so a grammar should be a hypothesis about language formulated and tested in the
same way. If correctly formulated, such a grammar will be ‘a device that generates all of the
grammatical sequences (of a language) and none of the ungrammatical ones.’
The task of linguistics was to formulate such grammars and to work out principles and procedures by
which they could be evaluated so that if a linguist was presented with two rival grammars, he could
automatically identify the better of the two and reject me other. (So by ‘evaluation procedures’ is meant
procedures for evaluating all the possible descriptions saying why one is better than the others).
The tasks before the Transformational, Generative grammarian, therefore, were to formulate a linguistic
theory which will account for all the linguistic levels of the language, inter-relate sound and meaning,
to provide a linguistic methodology for structural description and evaluation procedures for evaluating
the best of all the available models of grammar and rejecting the other ones, and to have explanatory
and descriptive adequacy.
By explanatory adequacy is meant the grammar’s capacity to offer an A.D., that is, a language
acquisitions device
Primary data — A.D. —G
In other words, it should be adequate to establish linguistic universals, to develop a general evaluation
procedure, to distinguish between the grammatical and the ungrammatical, between the more
grammatical and less grammatical. That is, the theory must provide a practical and mechanical method
for actually constructing the grammar, given a corpus of utterances. One way of testing the adequacy
would be to determine whether or not the sequences it generates, are actually grammatical, acceptable
to a native speaker, whether or not it mirrors the behaviour of the speaker.
Descriptive adequacy is an external condition. That is, a grammar must produce all and only
grammatical sentences of that language, should offer a description of all the sentences, must indicate
all the grammatical functions such as Subject, Object, Adverb, Adjective, etc., must indicate and specify
ambiguity, if any, and must indicate grammatical relations, and processes such as paraphrasing,
embedding, conjoining, deletion, permutation, etc. Furthermore, it should determine selectional
restrictions or constraints too.

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