key Concepts in TGG 2

Chomsky sees that linguistic theory should be concerned with linguistic universals, i.e with the common characteristics between human languages. According to him, the deep structure is common, and languages differ only at the level of transformational rules which produce different surfaces.

For Chomsky, "A language is a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements."(Syntactic Structures, p.13). This definition concerns all languages (natural and man-made). It implies the following points:

•  Language is a collection of the infinite number of possible sentences.
•  Every sentence is finite in length.
•  Every sentence is made up of elements that can be collected in a set, and that can be counted (sounds, morphemes and words)
• Language is defined in terms of “sentences”

Grammar is defined as "a device which generates all and only the grammatical sentences of a language." This definition implies the following points:

• The sentence is the basic unit to be described by grammar.
• A grammar generates sentences. That is to say, it produces an infinite number of sentences out of precisely specified rules. 
•  The rules of generative grammar represent knowledge.
• A grammar generates “all and only” the grammatical (intuitively accepted as well-formed) sentences of a language. That is to say, grammar should be able to generate all possible grammatical sentences of the language, and it excludes the ungrammatical (ill-formed) ones.

Grammaticality is the most important thing in the description of sentences.