Transformational Generative Grammar

Since a grammar of language is an explicit characterization of all the rules of that language , including the rules of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantic, it must reflect all aspect of a speaker’s linguistik knowledge. This requires that is specify all and only the grammatical sentences of a language with descriptions of sentences structures, if it failed to specify all the possible sentences it would not account fo a speaker’s ability to do this ; if it was not restricted to only the grammatical sentences it would not account for speaker’s ability to distinguish between grammatical and non grammatical strings.

The end product of the linguistic investigation of competence is a systematic description of linguistic knowledge, called the grammar of the language. A grammar that meets this goal in an explicit and testable fashion is called a generative grammar. The Term generative is associated with the tradition of grammatical research initiated and inspired by the work of noam Chomsky. This term is sometimes construed very narrowly to refer only to work direcly derivative from chomsky’s. here it will be used more broadly to refer to work generally within the chomskyan tradition, irrespective of wheter its formalism and terminology come directly from Chomsky.

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