Chomsky: Aspects of Theories of Syntaxes Questions: What is the background/context for the experiment and hypothesis?

Acceptableness and grammaticalness Acceptableness is how the sentence feels. Its if the sentence sounds natural and flows and is clear and easy to understand. Whereas grammaticalness is how grammatically correct a given sentence is on a technical level. A sentence that is completely grammatically correct may not be very acceptable and vice-versa. Chomsky believes that every human is born with a sort of universal grammar that helps explain why children can start speaking at a very young age and learn it all in a very short time In generative grammar, Chomsky states that sentences can be broken up into subgroups such as noun phrases and verb phrases generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures The three major components are syntactic, phonological, and semantic components. The syntactic part draws upon an infinite set of abstract formal objects which all goes to interpreting a sentence. Deep-structure is the semantic interpretation and the surface-structure is the phonetic interpretation One problem is that there is no way to observe the speaker-hearers competence about his knowledge of the language. It cannot be directly observed or inducted. What was the hypothesis that the researchers wanted to investigate? What is the underlying linguistic structure? The critical problem for grammatical theory today is not a paucity of evidence but rather the inadequacy of present theories of language to account for masses of evidence that are hardly open to serious question Some sentences can have different meanings as a whole such as flying planes can be dangerous Surface structure can be quite unrevealing of its deep structure. Often a reader will not even realize how different the deep structures are until they are explicitly pointed out to him.

Primary linguistic data is the input of well-formed sentences and examples of non-sentences and this is what is required for language learning. Justifications of a generative grammar include that the grammar is justified to the extent that it correctly describes its object. This is justification on external grounds. The justification on internal grounds is that the person has a predisposition to a certain interpretation of a sentence over another. The problem with internal justification though is constructing a theory of language acquisition on the account of the innate abilities that allow us to learn language. How are some languages unique and how are they universally connected? Grammar can be justified on external grounds of descriptive adequacy and it can be justified internally as well. What experiment did the researchers perform to investigate their hypothesis? What were the results of the experiment? What was the researchers' interpretation of these results? Does the experiment investigate the hypothesis? What flaws in the experiment (or reality) hamper the investigation of the hypothesis? To what extent, then, can the researcher's interpretation of the results be accepted? Is there an alternative explanation or context of the experimental results?