Page 355 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 28: Transformational Generative Grammar

To summarize the tasks and goals of linguistic theory, we can draw the following diagram to be Notes
followed by detailed explanations :
GOALS OF TG

LINGUISTIC LANGUAGE LINGUISTIC
THEORY ACQUISTION METHODOLOGY

STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION
SET OF HYPOTHESES
EVALUATION PROCEDURE JUSTI
FICATION OF GRAMMAR
SEMANTIC ESTABLISHMENT OF RESTRICTI-
REPRESENTATION ONS/ CONSTRAINTS
ADEQUACY, PREDICTIVENESS
SYNTACTIC AND EXPLICITNESS
REPRESENTATION
FORMALISM, OBJECTIVITY
PHONOLOGICAL PRECISION, SIMPLICITY
REPRESENTATION

Thus the tasks and goals of a Transformational-Generative theory were to be the following :
1. A linguistic theory should distinguish between competence and performance. The linguist’s
interest lies not in the actual utterances of the native speaker of a language, but rather in what he
CAN say, his ‘knowledge’ of the language, his ‘competence’. By performance is meant what a
native speaker of a language says at a time, the sentence he actually produces. So the actual
sentences produced by him are not themselves the object of the investigation of the linguist but
merely form a part of the evidence for his competence.
2. It should relate sound and meaning.
3. It should account for all the linguistic levels of the language.
4. It should generate all and the only sentences of language.
5. It should provide a grammar which would be a device to generate from a finite set an infinite
number of sentences.
6. It should offer the structural descriptions of grammatical sentences.
7. It should capture the native speaker’s intuition.
8. It should explicate grammatical relationships and functions of various constituents of a structure.
9. It should indicate grammatical categories and classes.
10. It should establish grammatical correctness, account for plausibility and probability of occurrences;
should be able to make a distinction between less grammatical, more grammatical and
ungrammatical.
11. It should establish universals of language and explicate language acquisition.
12. It should have explanatory and descriptive adequacy, should provide not only discovery and
decision procedures but also evaluation procedures.
13. It should account for creativity of the user (rule-changing and rule-governed creativity).
14. It should account for the sameness and unsameness of the language, show why sentences which
are apparently very similar in their external appearance, are in fact understood differently by
the speakers of a language; should disambiguate ambiguities, account for synonymities and
immediate as well as ultimate constituents, immediate as well as remote relationships, account
for all kinds of sentences, and syntactic relationships.
Hence the term grammar is being used here as linguistic theory—as a finite mechanism, capable of
generating an infinite set of grammatical sentences, and of automatically associating structural
description with each of them.

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