Talk:Generative grammar

Obsolete

• Should it not be mentioned that this is an obsolete theory?

• i don't know about other fields but this is still relevant in computer science

• This is still a relevant theory in the basic study of linguistics.

• it is still a releant theory and not a dead one although popularity has declined. it shold not be merged with gen. ling.

It is far from "obsolete", though there is much argument about its meaning in linguistics. Rainwarrior 02:29, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Not at ALL obsolete. We're still actively working and researching in this paradigm!!! AndrewCarnie

It's not a paradigm, it's just structuralism that claims not to be structuralism. In fact it's a structuralism taken to the extreme. Chomsky's rebellion against his predecessors was mainly with behaviourism. The fact that the structuralist skeletons have never been cleaned out of the closets accounts for the tendency of generativists to claim attested diachronic changes (that is, the results of diachronic processes) as synchronic processes. I agree however that generativism is not obsolete, it is sadly receiving still a staggering amount of funding.--AkselGerner (talk) 20:53, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm currently an MA Ling student at Case Western. Two specific problems with GG are 1) Poverty of stimulus argument breaks down when you examine usage-based corpora in depth and 2) the You Can't Get There From Here Problem, that is, GG provides no explanation linking child language use to adult language use to the supposed universal grammar. Ref, Tomasello- "Constructing a Language". It should be mentioned that GG is relevant in comp. sci and formal models, but for balance it must be stated that this theory has been largely discredited in terms of its ability to account for actual language production. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.185.187.54 (talk) 04:07, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Please ignore the last paragraph. The Cognitive linguistics ideologues must have filled his head with nonsense.

Merge?

• Looks like two article about the same subject. Merge Kerowyn 00:36, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

• JA: Keep separate. These are two distinct concepts. A generative grammar is a technical concept that originated within the field of study called generative linguistics, but it is often used in other fields, such as computer science, and it is also used to some perhaps modified extent in branches of or perspectives on linguistics that would not be described as generative linguistics by their participants. Also, its full development as a subtopic within any other article would eventually need to be broken out as a technical subsidiary, anyway. Jon Awbrey 13:50, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

• Don't merge. Generative grammar is used widely outside of linguistics. Rainwarrior 02:23, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

It's been a few months and we seem to have more against than for. Mostly it seems people are uninterested in comment. Anyhow, I've decided to remove the merge suggestion. Rainwarrior 07:53, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Don't merge. --IceHunter 04:57, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

• To merge or not to merge, it's preposterous to have a microarticle for the general theory and then a vast amount of text for the specific subtheory. Some material could be moved to the generative linguistics article, or generative grammar could be moved in it's entirety to that article as generative grammar is about 95% of generative linguistics anyway. Generative grammar in computer science would have to have it's own article anyway. Anyway, something should be done to flesh out the "generative linguistics" article, even if they are not merged.--AkselGerner (talk) 21:03, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree. The Generative Linguistics article seems to be little more than a stub. If there is more to say about it apart from a technical description of various flavors of generative grammar, then it needs a lot of expansion. But if, as I believe to be the case, there is not much to add there, then the Generative Grammar page should be incorporated there. I also agree that there should be a different page for a CS audience. Ailun (talk) 16:18, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

• Don't merge, the linguistic theory is broader than just the grammar. Given that all but the first vote was against merging, I'll remove the merge tag. linas (talk) 16:57, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Revert of 62.192.140.219's changes

On July 9th, 2006, 62.192.140.219 made changes to this page which, even if new information was added (it is difficult to tell), removed several pieces of useful information, pictures, wiki links, and formatting; furthermore, it was written in a very poor style (it reads like an undergraduate essay). I have reverted this edit. - Rainwarrior 17:59, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Huh?

It's not that I don't think that there may be some candles of truth in this article's description of the theory presented, BUT for the most part the page is written in such a fashion that it sounds like a lot of BS masquerading as intelligent discourse -- sort of what you would present to a college professor in an oral exam if you wanted him to think you knew what you were talking about -- but really didn't cause instead of studying you had stayed up too late partying the evening before.Fungible 09:01, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Really? To me it sounds technical, if a little overdone for an encyclopedia. Most BSing I've done on college papers, at least, hasn't included appropriate references to very technical and specific facets of the ideas being discussed. Although I do think this article needs improvement and better organization, in particular w.r.t. its subject matter's applications in other areas. Space Dracula 05:22, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

It IS too technical and waffley - the whole idea of an encyclopedia is to educate - not to reconfirm what someone already knows. Don;t forget that although you can have technical explanations, the first paragraph should sum up first - then you can have technicalities after. I came onto this article out of interest (from Chomsky entry) and I have no idea of what Generative grammar is after reading this article as I am not a linguistics student Gruffster 20:30, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Same. I am non the wiser as to what generative grammar actually is. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.106.30.140 (talk) 23:01, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

"Infinite" possibilities

Some linguists go so far as to claim that the set of grammatical sentences of any natural language is indeed infinite.

Isn't this obvious, though? You can make an infinitely long sentence. All you have to do is stack clause upon clause upon clause. I doubt there is a language where such a thing isn't possible, because this sort of flexibility with clauses is an essential feature of language. It logically follows that if you can generate an infinitely long sentence, then there is an infinite number of possible sentences. - furrykef (Talk at me) 21:53, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

IINM, the consensus is that while sentences have no bounds on their lengths, an infinite string is not a sentence. (For one, its grammaticality would be indeterminate.) However, the set of all sentences of unbounded length could be put into a one-to-one correspondence with, say, the infinite set of natural numbers. jackaroodave 69.207.251.137 21:39, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Balance?

• Seems to me that this page needs some work to make it more balanced. It seems to give little or no indication that there have ever been legitimate challenges to Chomskyan generative grammar. And although it's nice that it mentions other generative frameworks, it proceeds to provide an article about only one. At least LFG etc. should be included in the history section. On the other hand, if it is considered appropriate to only provide links to articles on LFG, etc, then this should be made a disambiguation page and almost all content here should become a page with a more specific title. Also, it seems to me very difficult to evaluate or even grasp Chomskyan generative grammar (at least) without a fairly thorough treatment of its fundamental assumptions and arguments (POS, etc.) along with, whenever possible, links to alternative arguments or approaches. I would try to do some of this myself but I'm pretty certain there are people here much better qualified than I. PS: I don't hate generative grammar. :) Ailun (talk) 16:36, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Merge TG with Generative grammar article

In my opinion the topics of transformational grammar and generative grammar would best be handled in one article. There's content in the TG article that should really be covered here (e.g. e-language, i-language). Perhaps a Chomskyan could help us out here. ----Action potential ^{t c} 12:17, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

This is a mistake. Generative grammar and transformational grammar are different things. Transformational grammar is a kind of generative grammar. But so is relational grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, Minimalism-linguistics, Government and Binding theory, and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. These are not transformational grammars, but they are generative grammars. (A generative grammar is one in which the set of grammatical sentences are generated (in the mathematical sense of the term, not the psychological sense) via a set of rules and constraints. A transformational grammar is one that uses a particular kind of rule, known as a transformation to do this. Please do not merge. AndrewCarnie (talk) 17:29, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

(PS, I do agree that the TG article needs some work, if I have time later this semester I'll do my best)AndrewCarnie (talk) 17:31, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I've removed the merge proposal. ----Action potential ^{t c} 00:26, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Is Categorial grammar an instance of generative grammar or not ?

In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar#Frameworks the article says "The term generative grammar has been associated with at least the following schools of linguistics: " and then lists, inter alia, Categorical Grammar as an instance. However, in the article about syntax, they are described as something completely different (http://en.wikipedia.osyrg/wiki/Syntax#Generative_grammar and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax#Categorial_grammar). This seems to be incoherent, at least to the naive reader. An explanation might rectify this, otherwise Categorical Grammar should be removed from the list.

92.233.157.159 (talk) 23:20, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Please keep Categorial Grammar in this list. It is true that there to readings: Generative grammar (with a lower-case grammar) is any grammar with recursive rules which enable it to generate an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of symbols (say, words). This is also true for TAG, HPSG, Categorial Grammar and other grammars listed under monostratal grammars in the article. On the other hand, Generative Grammar (with a capital second G) is a collective term for all the Generative grammar conceptions Chomsky proposed. In the past, these were usually transformational grammars, but recently, Chomsky seems to start listening to psycholinguists and perhaps computational linguists who have never believed in transformations. In summary, transformational grammar used to be the better term for Chomsky's Generative Grammar, but since the Minimalist Program it probably is no longer. Perhaps Principles-and-Parameters approach is the better term for Chomskyan Generative Grammar. --Thüringer ☼ (talk) 01:04, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Small point of detail

The first paragraph ends with the phase "the morphology of a sentence." Looking at the linked article on morphology (linguistics), I find that morpohology is all about the forms of words, not sentences. Therefore, the phrase "the morphology of a sentence" seems defective, unless the article about morphology is defective instead. Looking at the history of this article, I see that this phrase has been standing for over a year and a half, but nonetheless, it is a little confusing. (As it stands right now, I still don't know what "morphology of a sentence" exactly means, if anything.) Could someone who knows the subject well clear this up?

It may be of interest to note that the editor that originally composed this sentence wrote it as:

In most approaches to generative grammar, the rules will also predict the semantics and morphology of a sentence.

This edit on 21:28, 21 January 2008 was made by G.broadwell, who on that day apparently rewrote (and overall substantially improved) the introductory section. The sentence was modified about two months later to remove "semantics and"; here is the edit history record:

13 March 2008 AkselGerner (talk | contribs) m (8,915 bytes) (Chomsky himself said that Semantics has no place in linguistics. Sentence semantics cannot be calculated.) (undo)

Since one claim of the original sentence (it appears) was incorrect, the rest of the sentence can be questioned. From what I knew about generative grammar before reading this article, I can see why a generative grammar might indicate a lot about the morphology of individual words (if "of words" is not redundant here) in that grammar, but that is not clearly what the sentence says, and certainly a reader with no prior exposure to generative grammars could not be expected to see that. A generative grammar necessarily defines the structure of sentences, so it is possible that what "morphology of sentences" means to say is redundant and underly definite, like saying, "A cat is a carnivorous four-legged furry mammal. Most cats are quadrupedal and warm-blooded."

71.242.6.231 (talk) 12:49, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Contrasting tree diagrams to show their utility

Hey, how about we explain how the deep structure of a sentence can be represented in a variety of ways using contrasting tree diagrams? Example (do tree diagrams for the following sentences): "The dog ate the bone." Vs. "The bone was eaten by the dog." Is this a good idea for this page?Xetxo (talk) 18:19, 7 December 2009 (UTC)