Some theoretical consequences of generative theory
GERMANIC STUDIES
Lecture 4
Generative Grammar
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2. Chomsky N. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory / Noam Chomsky. – The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1970. – 119 p.
3. Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language / [ed. T. McArthur, R. McArthur]. – Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. – 700p.
4. Haegeman L. English Grammar: A Generative Perspective / L. Haegeman and J. Guéron. – Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. – 674 p.
5. Lyons J. Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics / John Lyons. – Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. – 519 p.
6. Palmer F. Grammar / Frank Palmer. – L., etc.: Pelican Books, 1984. – 205 p.
7. Robins R.H. A Short History of Linguistics / R. H. Robins. – Norfolk, 1976. – 248 p.
1. Noam Chomsky and his contribution to linguistic theory
2. The notion of generative grammar in linguistics
3. Transformational generative grammar of Noam Chomsky
In 1957, linguistics took a new turning. Noam Chomsky, then aged 29, a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of technology, published a book called “Syntactic structures”. Although containing fewer than 120 pages, this little book started a revolution in linguistics. Chomsky is, arguably, the most influential linguist of the 20th century. Certainly, he is the linguist whose reputation has spread furthest outside linguistics. He has transferred linguistics from a relatively obscure discipline of interest mainly to PhD students and future missionaries into major social science of direct relevance to psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and others.
Avram Noam Chomsky (1928 - ). American linguist and political writer, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and introduced to philology by his father, a scholar of Hebrew. At the University of Pennsylvania he studied under the structural linguist Zellig Harris. After gaining his PhD in 1955 (dissertation “Transformational Analysis”), he taught modern languages and linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became full professor in 1961. He was appointed Ferrari P. Ward Professor of foreign languages and linguistics in 1976. During this period, he became a leading figure in US linguistics, replacing a mechanistic and behaviouristic view of language (based on the work of L. Bloomfield) with a mentalistic and generative approach. His linguistic publications include “Syntactic theories”(1957), “Aspects of Theory of Syntax”(1965), “Cartesian Linguistics”(1966), “The Sound Pattern of English”(with Morris Halle, 1968), “Language and Mind”(1968, 1972), “The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory”(1975), “Reflections on Language” (1975), “Lectures on Government and Binding”(1981), “Barriers”(1986) and others. His social, political and economic works include: “American Power and the New mandarins” (1969), “The Political Economy of Human Rights” (2 volumes, 1979). “Language and Responsibility” (1979) combines his linguistic and social interests by exploring relationships among language, science, ideas and politics.
According to N.Chomsky Bloomfieldian linguistics was born far too ambitious and far too limited in scope. It was too ambitious in that it was unrealistic to expect to be able to lay down foolproof rules for extracting a perfect description of a language from a mass of data. It was too limited because it concentrated on describing sets of utterances which happened to have been spoken. N.Chomsky has shifted attention away from detailed descriptions of actual utterances, and started asking questions about the nature of the system which produces the output.
A grammar, he claimed, should be more than a description of old utterances. It should also take into account possible future utterances. In short the traditional view point that the main task of linguists is simply to describe a corpus of actual utterances cannot account for the characteristic of productivity, or creativity, as N. Chomsky prefers to call it.
N.Chomsky points out that anyone who knows a language must have internalized a set of rules which specify the sequences permitted in their language. In his opinion, a linguist’s task is to discover these rules, which constitute the grammar of the language in question. N. Chomsky therefore uses the word “grammar” interchangeably to mean, on the one hand, a person’s internalized rules, and on the other hand, a linguist’s guess as to these rules. This is perhaps confusing, as the actual rules in a person’s mind are unlikely to be the same as a linguist’s hypothesis, even though there will probably be some overlap.
A grammar which consists of a set of statements or rules which specify which sequences of a language are possible, and which are impossible, is a generative grammar. Chomsky, therefore, initiated the era of generative linguistics. In his words, a grammar will be “a device which generates all the grammatical sequences of a language and none of the ungrammatical ones”. Such a grammar is perfectly explicit, in that nothing is left to the imagination. The rules must be precisely formulated in such a way that anyone would be able to separate the well-formed sentences from the ill-formed ones, even if they did not know a word of the language concerned. The particular type of generative grammar favoured by Chomsky is so-called transformational one.
N. Chomsky originated such concepts as transformational-generative grammar (TGG), transformational grammar (TG), and generative grammar. Generative grammar – a grammar which precisely specifies the membership of the set of all the grammatical sentences in the language in question and therefore excludes all the ungrammatical sentences. It takes the form of a set of rules that specify the structure, interpretation, and pronunciation of sentences that native speakers of the language are considered to accept as belonging to the language; it is therefore regarded as representing native speaker’s competence in or knowledge of their language.
His definition of grammar differs from both traditional and structuralist theories in that he is concerned not only with a formal descriptive system but also with the linguistic structures and processes at work in the mind. He sees such structures as universal and arising from a genetic predisposition to language. Features drawn from mathematics include transformation and generation. As proposed in 1957, transformational rules were a means by which one kind of a sentence (such as the passive The work was done by local men) could be derived from another kind (such as the active The local men did the work). Any process governed by such rules was a transformation (in the preceding case the passivization transformation) and any sentence resulting from such rules was a transform. In Chomsky’s terms, previous grammars had only phrase-structure rules, which specified how sentences are structured out of phrases and phrases are out of words, but had no way of relating sentences with different structures (such as active and passive).
Such earlier grammars were also concerned only with actual attested sentences and not with all the potential sentences in a language. An adequate grammar, however, in his view, should generate (that is, explicitly account for) the indefinite set of acceptable sentences of a language, rather than the finite set to be found in a corpus of texts. “Aspects” (1965) presented what is known as his “standard theory”, which added the concepts deep structure and surface structure: deep or underlying forms which by transformation become surface or observable sentences of a particular language. In this theory, a passive was no longer to be derived from an active sentence, but both from deep structure which was neither active nor passive. Comparably, sentences with similar surface structures, such as John is easy to please and John is eager to please were shown to have different deep structures. The standard theory distinguish between a speaker’s competence (knowledge of language) and performance (actual use of a language), Chomskyan grammar being concerned with competence, not with performance.
Subsequent work has concentrated less on rules that specify what can be generated and more on constraints that determine what cannot be generated. A definitive statement of his recent views is “Lectures on Government and Binding”, in which the theory is GB theory. Government is an extension of the traditional term whereby a verb governs its object, by for Chomsky prepositions may govern and subjects may be governed. Binding is concerned with the type of anaphora found with pronouns and reflexes, but the notion is greatly extended. The traditional notion of case is similarly used, though modified in that it need not be morphological. Such devices can be used to rule out ungrammatical sentences that might otherwise be generated. “Barriers” (1986) extends GB theory.
N. Chomsky is widely considered to be the most influential figure in linguistics in the later 20th c. and is probably the linguist best-known outside the field. His views on language and grammar are controversial and responses to them have ranged from extreme enthusiasm, sometimes verging on fanatism, though a sober and reflective interest, to fierce rejection by some traditionalist, structuralist, and other critics.
N. Chomsky has not only initiated the era of generative grammars. He has also redirected attention towards language universals. He points out that as all the humans are rather similar, their internalized language mechanisms are likely to have important common properties. He argues that linguistics should concentrate on finding elements and constructions that are available to all languages, whether or not they actually occur. Above all, they should seek to specify the universal bounds or constraints within which human language operates.
The constraints on human language are, he suggests, inherited ones. Human beings may well be pre-programmed with a basic knowledge of what languages in general are like, and how they work. N. Chomsky has given the label Universal Grammar (UG) to this inherited core, and he regarded it as a major task of linguistics to specify what it consists of.
N. Chomsky is not the only linguist to have made proposals about generative grammar and universal frameworks. The search for universal generative grammar is a general characteristics of theoretical linguistics at the present time, and various proposals have been made. Chomsky’s theories, however, are those which have received the most widespread attention in the past quarter century, even though it is possible that, after more research, one of the less well-known rival systems will turn out to be superior.
An exploration of interest in language among non-linguists has been a valuable by-product of Chomsky’s work. The emphasis within linguistics has turned to the language potential of human being in general, rather than the detailed description of single languages. As a result, huge numbers of psychologists, neurologists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, to name just a few, have began to take a greater interest in language and linguistics. Collaboration between linguists and these other social scientists has lead to the development of what were once considered “fringe areas”, such as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, but are now the major fields in their own right.
Transformational-Generative grammar or (Generative Grammar) was initially worked out by the American linguist Zelling Harris as a method of analyzing sentences and was later elaborated by another American scholar Noam Chomsky as a synthetic method of “generating” (constructing) sentences.
It is without question the most influential theory of linguistics in modern times, and one that no serious scholar can afford to neglect. The theory was, undoubtedly, revolutionary and even greeted with total scepticism by many scholars, but, as with all revolutions, some of it had been foreshadowed in earlier works, particularly in the writings of N. Chomsky’s own teacher Zellig Harris, and there had already been some movement away from the rather rigid and sterile attitudes of the postBloomfieldian structuralists. N. Chomsky has considerably modified his ideas since 1957, and in his philosophical views has vastly distanced himself from the structuralists, and indeed from the whole of the empiricist tradition.
The term “generative grammar”, which was introduced into linguistics by N. Chomsky in the mid-1950s, is nowadays employed in two rather different senses. In its original, narrower and more technical, sense, it refers to sets of rules which define various kinds of language-systems.
It its second, broader sense – for which we will use the term “generativism” – it refers to a whole body of theoretical and methodological assumptions about language-structure. Not only was N. Chomsky the originator of the version of generative grammar most widely used in linguistics, but he has also been most influential, not only in linguistics, but also in other disciplines. Among the others the names of L. Haegeman, R. Jackendoff, A. Radford and others can be mentioned here.
The term “generative”, used as a definition, is to be understood in exactly the sense in which it is used in mathematics. It is in the abstract, or static, sense of the term that the rules of a generative grammar are said to generate the sentences of a language. The important point is that “generate”, in this sense, does not relate to any process of sentence-production in real time by speakers (or machines). A generative grammar is mathematically precise specification of the grammatical structure of the sentence it generates. The general hypothesis is: syntax is driven by morphology. It allows to understand how a child learns his or her language.
Another important point to note about the definition of generative grammar is that it allows for the existence of many different kinds of generative grammars. The question for theoretical linguistics is this: which, if any, of the indefinitely many different kinds of generative grammars will best serve as a model for the grammatical structure of natural languages? The question presupposes that all natural languages can be modeled by grammars of the same kind. This assumption is commonly made these days in theoretical linguistics. One reason why generativists make it is that all human beings are apparently capable of acquiring any natural language. It is in principle possible that very different kinds of generative grammars should be appropriate for the description of different kinds of natural languages. But so far there is no reason to believe that this is so.
The finite-state grammars are not powerful enough in principle; it is largely because finite-state models were being constructed in the 1950s by behaviourist psychologists that Chomsky was concerned to demonstrate their inappropriateness as models of the grammatical structure of language.
Transformational grammars, on the other hand, are certainly powerful enough in principle to serve as models for the grammatical description of natural language-systems. But there are all sorts of transformational grammars. They permit the formulation of rules which are never required in the description of natural languages. Ideally, this is at the very heart of generativism, one wants a type of generative grammar which is just powerful enough to reflect directly and perspicuously, those properties of the grammatical structure of natural languages which are essential to them. Chomsky demonstrated, in his earliest work, that some kinds of generative grammars are intrinsically more powerful than others: they can generate all the formal languages that less powerful grammars cannot generate. In particular, he proved that finite-state grammars are less powerful than phrase-structure grammars (of various kinds) and that phrase-structure grammars are less powerful than transformational grammars.
Though a particular type of transformational grammar, formalized by N. Chomsky in the mid-1950-s and modified several times since then, has dominated theoretical syntax since that time. The stages in its development are: Standard theory, Extended standard theory, Government and Binding theory (=Theory of principles and parameters) and Minimalist theory. We’ll speak about the earliest version of generative grammar.
In 1957 N. Chomsky published his “Syntactic Structures”, a brief and watered down summary of several years of original research. In that book, and in his succeeded publications, he made a number of revolutionary proposals: he introduced the idea of generative grammar, developed a particular kind of generative grammar called transformational grammar, rejected his American predecessors’ emphasis on the description of data – in favour of highly theoretical approach based on a search for universal principles of language (later called universal grammar) – proposed to turn linguistics firmly into towards mentalism, and laid the foundations for integrating the field into as yet unnamed new discipline of cognitive science.
The essence of the approach is summarized by N. Chomsky as providing an answer to the question “How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?” By studying the human language faculty, it should be possible to show how a person constructs a knowledge system out of everyday experience, and thus move some way towards solving this problem.
The main point of the TG is that the endless variety of sentences in a language can be reduced to a finite number of kernels by means of transformations. These kernel sentences the basis for generating sentences by means of syntactic processes.
The appearance of N. Chomsky’s TG and its long lasting popularity all over the world and especially in the USA, can also be explained by the fact that in the previous centuries languages were studied exclusively for the purpose of reading their literatures. But the speed and frequency of international communication have outsripped the speed of teaching and learning languages. It became clear that a systemic scientific investigation is needed to advance the teaching of languages. Linguistics faced the task of working out an efficient workable theory to be applied to tackle practical problems, such as information data processing, electronic machine translation, pattering, aural comprehension of speech and others which seem to have direct application to classroom language teaching.
N. Chomsky’s theory of TG has to solve two fundamental problems, such as:
1. why a young child has the ability to gain in a short time and with no special tuition, a command of his own language;
2. why people speak their native languages however complex they may be.
The TG provided the following explanations:
1. Any language contains a rather small number of kernel sentences and their linguistic units (such as phonemes and morphemes), and all the other linguistic forms, sentences of different structure, and derived or generated from these kernel elements by certain derivation rules which are not very numerous or difficult.
2. It is the simplicity and regularity of the structure of any language that makes it possible for a child to grasp it and for human communities to speak it.
Transformational grammar has three major components: a syntactic component (dealing with syntax), a phonological component (dealing with sounds) and semantic component (dealing with meaning). Its syntactical component is split into two components: the base (the semantic component) and the transformational rules (phonological component).
N. Chomsky also drew particular attention, at the outset, to two properties of English and other natural languages which must be taken into account in the search for the right kind of generative grammar: recursiveness and constituent structure. Both of these are reflected, directly and perspicuously, in phrase structure grammar.
Recursiveness – the quality of being recursive, i.e. drawing upon itself.
Recursive – in logic, mathematics – the application of a function to its own values to generate an infinite sequence of values.
Recursion is the possibility of repeatedly re-using the same construction, so that there is no fixed limit to the length of sentences. This has important implications. It means that we cam make a complete list of all possible sentences of any language.
Transformational grammar is a grammar which sets up two levels of structure, and relates these levels by means of transformations: N. Chomsky suggests that every sentence has two levels of structure, one which is obvious on the surface, and another which is deep and abstract.
Deep structure is the set of all the base-positions (= original position which element occupies in the structure) of the elements in the sentence.
Surface structure is a structure obtained after various movements have rearranged elements.
It is clearly necessary to link these two levels in some way. He suggested that the deep structures are related to surface structures by processes called transformations. A deep structure is transformed into its related surface structure by the application of one or more transformations.
A major aim of generative grammar was to provide a means of analyzing sentences that took account of deep structure. To achieve this aim, Chomsky drew a fundamental distinction between a person’s knowledge of the rules of the language and the actual use of that language in real situations. The first referred to as competence; the second as performance. Linguistics should be concerned with the study of competence and not restrict itself to performance – something that was characteristic of previous linguistic studies in their reliance on samples (or “corpora”) of speech. Such samples were inadequate because they could provide only a tiny fractions of the sentences it is impossible to say in a language; they also contained many non-fluencies, changes of plan, and other errors of performance. Speakers use their competence to go far beyond the limitations of any corpus, by being able to create and recognize novel sentences, and to identify performance errors. The description of the rules governing the structure of this competence was thus the more important goal.
N. Chomsky’s proposals were intended to discover the mental realities underlying the way people use language: competence is seen as an aspect of our general psychological capacity. It is explicit. Competence is regarded as the system of rules and symbols that provides a formal representation of the underlying syntactic, semantic, and phonological structure of sentences. Linguistics was thus envisaged as a mentalistic discipline - a view that contrasted with the behavioural bias of previous 20th –century work in the subject, and connected with the aims of several earlier linguists (such as Port-Royal grammarians). It was also argued that linguistics should not simply limit itself to the description of competence. In the long term, there was a still more powerful target: to provide a grammar capable of evaluating the adequacy of different accounts of competence, and of going beyond the study of individual languages to the nature of human language as a whole (by discovering “linguistic universals”). In this way it was hoped, linguistics would be able to make a contribution to our understanding of the nature of the human mind.
Since 1950s, much of linguistics has been taken up with proposals to develop the form of generative grammars, and the original theory has been reformulated several times. During the same period, also, there have been several proposals for alternative models of grammatical analysis to those expounded by Chomsky and his associates, some of which have attracted considerable support. As a consequence, linguistic theory, the core of scientific language study, is now lively and controversial field.
N. Chomsky’s ideas excited the whole generation of students; since American universities were expanding rapidly in the early 1960s, these students quickly found jobs and began developing the field, and within a few years Chomskyan linguistics has become a new orthodoxy in the USA. Before long, Chomsky’s ideas crossed the Atlantic and established themselves in Europe. Today they are still popular with the community of linguists all over the world.
Some theoretical consequences of generative theory
Since the 1960s, several fresh theoretical approaches to grammatical analysis have emerged, most of which can be seen as a development of Chomsky’s proposals – or as a reaction against them.
Case grammar
The American linguist, Charles Fillmore (1929 - ), devised a theory which focused on the semantic roles (or “cases”) played by elements of the sentence structure.
Relational grammar
This approach views grammatical relations (e.g. “subject”, “object”) as central, rather than the formal categories (e.g. “noun phrase”, “verb phrase”) or earlier generative theory.
Montague Grammar
This approach derives from the work of the American logician Richard Montague (1930-1970), and is based on the study of logical languages. A close correspondence is set up between the categories of syntax and semantics.