Origins of Transformational Generative Grammar
| Site: | Plateforme pédagogique de l'Université Sétif2 |
| Course: | Introduction to Linguistics |
| Book: | Origins of Transformational Generative Grammar |
| Printed by: | مستخدم ضيف |
| Date: | Friday, 4 July 2025, 4:41 AM |
Description
Introduction
From the late 1950s onwards, structural linguistics has sometimes been used with less popularity because supporters of generative linguistics initiated by Noam Chomsky have regarded the work of American structuralists as too limited in conception. They have argued that it is essential to go further than the position of items to produce a grammar which reflects a native speaker’s knowledge of language.
1. Noam Chomsky and TGG
Transformational Generative Grammar (also TG grammar, TGG) is a theory of grammar which attempted to provide a model for the description of all languages. It was launched and dominated by Avram Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), and it may be said to have officially begun with the publication of his book Syntactic Structures in 1957 (the classical theory) though some of the theory had been prefigured a few years before in introductory papers by Chomsky as well as in articles by Zellig Harris. Chomsky’s early work falls into two related points:
2. New formulation of linguistic theory
Chomsky has considerably modified his ideas since 1957. Undeniably, the best known theoretical position is that of Aspects of the theory of Syntax (written in 1965) or the Aspects Model, a position that Chomsky himself has called the Standard Theory. It is, in fact, the most recognized version of the theory since it added important considerations to the study of language. TGG was revolutionary and it is, undoubtedly, the most forceful and prominent in the century. No linguist who wishes to keep track of contemporary developments in the field can afford to overlook Chomsky’s theoretical contributions.
2. Criticism of Structuralism
For Chomsky, structural linguistics involved some weaknesses in conceptions and in methodology.
2.1. Corpus Analysis
For American structuralists, an empirical science studies only observable phenomena. For descriptive purposes, a language was defined in terms of a corpus. A linguistic corpus has a level of phonological structure, a level of morphological structure and a level of syntactic structure. They believed that when all elements of the corpus were grouped and labelled at each level, the grammar of the language was complete.
Structural grammars offer an inventory of forms and constructions which appear in a limited corpus; they do not provide the rules needed to construct an endless range of possible grammatical sentences. For Chomsky, a corpus can never represent the whole language, but will only cover an incomplete and a selective sample of it because language is infinite and creative in nature. TGG supporters suggest that instead of describing a corpus, a linguist can arrive at an inclusive grammar of language by describing its underlying system of rules, which is not contained within the corpus, but lies beyond it, in the minds of the speakers. The study of this system is more important than the study of the actual sentences.