Generative linguistics is a school of thought within
linguistics that makes use of the concept of a
generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping, meanings.
Formally, a generative grammar is defined as one that is fully explicit. It is a finite set of rules that can be applied to
generate exactly those sentences (often, but not necessarily, infinite in number) that are grammatical in a given language (or, of course, particular
dialect or otherwise
sociolinguistically defined way of using a language), and no others. This is the definition that is offered by
Noam Chomsky, who popularised the term, and by most dictionaries of linguistics. It is important to note that
generate is being used as a technical term with a slightly obscure sense. To say that a grammar generates a sentence means that the grammar "assigns a structural description" to the sentence.
[1]
More popularly, but somewhat to the apparent distaste of certain professional linguists including Chomsky, the term is used to define the approach to linguistics taken by Chomsky and his followers. Chomsky's approach is characterised by the use of
transformational grammar - a theory that has changed greatly since it was first promulgated by Chomsky in his
1957 book
Syntactic Structures - and by the assertion of a strong linguistic
nativism (and therefore an assertion that some set of fundamental characteristics of all human languages must be the same). The term "generative linguistics" is often applied to the earliest version of Chomsky's transformational grammar, which was associated with a distinction between the "
deep structure" and "
surface structure" of sentences.
Chomsky also launched his approach to linguistics with a virulent attack on alternative approaches, in particular the
behaviorist view then popular, in the form in which it had been put forward by
B. F. Skinner in a book also published in 1957,
Verbal Behavior. A final, and still looser, meaning of "generative linguistics", therefore, might be summarised as "anti-Skinnerian linguistics" - or just generalised anti-behaviorism.
Psycholinguistics, which in the early
1960s was developing rapidly as part of the general movement towards
cognitive psychology, found this anti-behaviorist emphasis congenial, and rapidly absorbed many Chomskian ideas including the notion of generative grammar. However, as both cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics have matured, they have found less and less use for generative linguistics, not least because Chomsky has repeatedly emphasised that he never intended to specify the mental processes by which people actually generate sentences, or parse sentences that they hear or read.
Cognitive linguistics emerged in the latter years of the twentieth century as an alternative linguistic paradigm to generative linguistics. Cognitive linguistics seeks to unify the understanding of language with the understanding of how specific neural structures function biologically. This is more a difference in practical research strategy than in philosophy: in principle, neurological evidence has always been considered relevant by generative linguists, but in practice it has usually been regarded as too inconclusive and open to interpretation to be of much use. However, some researchers within generative linguistics (e.g.
Alec Marantz) publish in neurolinguistics.
References
1.
^ Chomsky, Noam (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.
For the journal, see .
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied. Someone who engages in this study is called a
linguist.
..... Click the link for more information. Theoretical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. Part of this endeavor involves the search for and explanation of linguistic universals, that is, properties all languages have in common.
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Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning 'sound, voice') is the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), and their production, audition and perception, while phonology, which
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For the journal, see .
Phonology (Greek
φωνή (phōnē), voice, sound +
λόγος (lógos), word, speech, subject of discussion), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a
..... Click the link for more information. For other uses, see Morphology.
Morphology is the field within linguistics that studies the internal structure of words. (Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology.
..... Click the link for more information. In computer science, SYNTAX is a system used to generate lexical and syntactic analyzers (parsers) (both deterministic and non-deterministic) for all kind of context-free grammars
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The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter.
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..... Click the link for more information. Lexical semantics is a subfield of linguistics. It is the study of how and what the words of a language denote (Pustejovsky, 1995). Words may either be taken to denote things in the world, or concepts, depending on the particular approach to lexical semantics.
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Statistical Semantics is the study of "how the statistical patterns of human word usage can be used to figure out what people mean, at least to a level sufficient for information access" (Furnas, 2006).
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Structural semantics deals with relationships between the meanings of terms within a sentence, and how meaning can be composed from smaller elements.
See also
- Principle of compositionality
- Ferdinand de Saussure
..... Click the link for more information. Prototype Theory is a mode of graded categorization in Cognitive Science, where some members of a category are more central than others. For example, when asked to give an example of the concept furniture, chair is more frequently cited than, say, stool.
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Pragmatics is the study of the ability of natural language speakers to communicate more than that which is explicitly stated. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.
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Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology.
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For the academic journal, see .
Language acquisition is the process by which the language capability develops in a human. First language acquisition concerns the development of language in children, while second language acquisition focuses on
..... Click the link for more information. Psycholinguistics or
psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language.
..... Click the link for more information. Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context on the way language is used. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics.
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Linguistic anthropology is that branch of anthropology that brings linguistic methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of semiotic and particularly linguistic forms and processes (on both small and large scales) to the interpretation of sociocultural
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In linguistics and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics (CL) refers to the school of linguistics that understands language creation, learning, and usage as best explained by reference to human cognition in general.
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Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. This modeling is not limited to any particular field of linguistics.
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Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is spoken (or how it was spoken in the past) by a group of people in a speech community. All scholarly research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other sciences, its aim is to observe the linguistic
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Historical linguistics (also
diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:
- to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;
..... Click the link for more information. Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their historical relatedness. Languages may be related by convergence through borrowing or by genetic descent.
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Etymology is the study of the history of words - when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.
In languages with a long written history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of how words change from culture to
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Stylistics is the study of varieties of language whose properties position that language in . For example, the language of advertising, politics, religion, individual authors, etc., or the language of a period in time, all belong in a particular situation.
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In linguistics, prescription can refer both to the codification and the enforcement of rules governing how a language is to be used. These rules can cover such topics as standards for spelling and grammar or syntax; or rules for what is deemed socially or politically correct.
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Linguistics as a study endeavors to describe and explain the human faculty of language and has been of scholarly interest throughout recorded history. Contemporary linguistics is the result of a continuous European intellectual tradition originating in ancient Greece that was later
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A linguist in the academic sense is a person who studies linguistics. Ambiguously, the word is sometimes also used to refer to a polyglot (one who knows more than 2 languages), or a grammarian, but these two uses of the word are distinct.
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This article discusses currently unsolved problems in linguistics.
Some of the issues below are commonly recognized as problems per se, i.e., it is general agreement that the solution is unknown. Others may be described as controversies, i.e.
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For the journal, see .
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied. Someone who engages in this study is called a
linguist.
..... Click the link for more information. In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a proof-theoretic framework for the study of syntax partially inspired by formal grammar theory and popularized by Noam Chomsky, and more specifically to particular instantiations of this general framework, that is,
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