What is linguistics?

Linguistics is the study of language -- but there are many approaches to the
study of language.

One might study language as a cultural phenomenon that binds people together
or divides them, as a tool for social interaction, or as an artistic medium. One
might take a historical perspective and study the familial relations among
languages or how languages have changed over time.

There is also an approach which sees language as interesting because it is

structured and accessible product of the human mind. As such, language offers a
means to study the nature of the mind that produces it. This is the approach
taken by the linguists in the Program in Linguistics at Princeton. More specifically,
our work is carried out within the framework of generative grammar. So...

What is generative grammar?

Linguists who work within the framework of generative grammar strive to

develop a general theory that reveals the rules and laws that govern the
structure of particular languages, and the general laws and principles governing
all natural languages. The basic areas of study include phonology (the study of
the sound patterns of language), morphology (the study of the structure and
meaning of words), syntax (the study of the structure of sentences), and
semantics (the study of linguistic meaning).

A signature feature of generative grammar is the view that humans have an

innate "language faculty" and that the universal principles of human language
reflect intrinsic properties of this language faculty. In learning their native
languages, children acquire specific rules that determine the sound and meaning
of utterances in the language. These rules interact with each other in complex
ways, and the entire system is learned in a relatively short time and with little or
no apparent conscious effort. The most plausible explanation for the success of
human language learners is that they have access to a highly restrictive set of
principles which does not require (or permit) them to consider many alternatives
in order to account for a particular construction, but instead limits them to a few
possible rules from which a choice can be made -- if necessary, without much
further evidence. Since there is no evidence that the principles that define the
class of possible rules and systems of rules are learned, it is thought that these
principles serve as the preconditions for language learning, forming part of the
innate capacity of every normal child. Viewed in this light, the principles we are
attempting to discover are part of the genetic endowment of all humans. It

follows that an understanding of these principles is necessary to an

understanding of the mental makeup of the human species.

Only after extensive parts of the grammars of different languages have been
formulated is it possible to ask questions concerning the ways in which various
languages differ or the ways in which all languages are the same. Consequently,
a large part of our effort is devoted to the study of linguistic detail (for example,
the interpretation of English verb phrase ellipsis, the morpho-semantics of the
Greek perfect, the syntax of multiple questions, or prosodic phrasing in Korean).
The ultimate goal is not merely to understand these details, but to use them as a
bridge to understanding the human language faculty in general.

nerative grammar, a precisely formulated set of rules whose output is all

(and only) the sentences of a languagei.e., of the language that it
generates. There are many different kinds of generative grammar,
including transformational grammar as developed byNoam Chomsky from
the mid-1950s. Linguists have disagreed as to which, if any, of these
different kinds of generative grammar serves as the best model for the
description of natural languages.
Generative grammars do not merely distinguish the grammatical sentence
of a language from ungrammatical sequences of words of the same
language; they also provide a structural description, or syntactic analysis,
for each of the grammatical sentences. The structural descriptions provided
by a generative grammar are comparable with, but more precisely
formulated than, the analyses that result from the traditional practice
of parsingsentences in terms of the parts of speech.

Syntax: generative grammar

Author: David Adger
David Adger

Abstract
Teaching syntax using a generative approach

Table of contents

Discussion

Bibliography

Related links

Discussion
Generative Grammar is an approach to dealing with linguistic phenomena which assumes that these
phenomena are amenable to formal analysis, and, in fact, can be best explained in such terms. It is
therefore opposed, at least in part, to approaches which take a functional perspective, and which
assume that linguistic phenomena can be analysed in terms of extra-linguistic pressures (the fact that
language can be used to communicate, the signifier-signifiee relationship, etc.). Typically, the formal
approach taken by Generative Grammar leads to a radical separation of sound, structure and
meaning. This article focusses on the Generative approach to Syntax.
Generative Syntax splits into two main camps, especially in the UK:

1. the transformationalist approach,

and
2. the non-transformationalist approach
The former springs from the work of Noam Chomsky, and the core idea is that linguistic phenomena
are best analysed at a number of distinct formal levels, which are related to each other by special
mappings, which transform one level into another. The latter approaches are best represented in the
UK by Generalised Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG), and its successor Head-Driven Phrase
Structure Grammar (HPSG); by Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and by various forms of Categorial
Grammar (CG). These approaches eschew mapping operations transforming different linguistic levels
in favour of other formal devices, most importantly, the idea that a lot of information is stored in lexical
items, and that combining lexical items leads to further specification of structure (unification).
Recently, the most influential transformationalist theory (the Minimalist Program) has rejected the idea
of specialised linguistic levels, and has moved closer towards a CG perspective.
When teaching generative syntax, a range of approaches is possible. I list here some of these, with
representative texts; I have used mainly recent texts (where available), and all of these texts
incorporate more than just the approach under which I have listed them. The categorization I give
here is tentative and to a large extent subjective. Which particular approach is suitable for a course
will depend on the instructor's tastes, and the rest of the programme.
Possible approaches include:

1. pick a particular theory, and show how this theory tackles a certain set of empirical
data, focussing on the need to analyse the data within a coherent framework
(Haegeman 1994; Haegeman and Gueron 1999; Radford 1997);
2. pick a particular theoretical perspective, and show how this can be developed into a
coherent theory by challenging it with empirical phenomena, focussing on modifying
the theoretical primes and maintaining consistency (mosts texts in HPSG and LFG see especially Sag & Wasow 1999, Bresnan 2001. For this kind of approach within a
transformationalist framework, see Adger forthcoming);
3. pick a particular approach and explain how empirical phenomena were used to
motivate its current form (many texts in the trasformationalist tradition: recent
examples include Roberts 1996,Culicover 1996; Ouhalla 1999; Carnie 2002, Poole
2002);
4. show how different approaches tackle particular phenomena, using their success as
a means to evaluate the theories empirically (especially Borsley 1999).
Within every approach, most syntacticians would agree, that possibly the most important thing to get
over to the students is some facility with syntactic argumentation: the development of explicit
hypotheses and their successive modification on the basis of new data; the evaluation of hypotheses
on the grounds of their consistency with the theory, and on general grounds of simplicity; the ability to
see the implications linking both theory and data so as to construct relevant counter-examples. In fact,
it is perfectly possible to provide students with no 'off-the-shelf' theoretical framework, but rather to let
them construct their own (this is the approach adopted in syntax teaching at the University of
California, Santa Cruz).