Transformational Generative Grammar and the Study of Language *

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Aoun, Youssef Sportiche, Dominique
Copyright Year	1980
Abstract	The fundamental question defining the research program of Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) is the following: 1 What insights into the formal properties of the mind/brain can the study of natural languages provide? The behaviour that individuals exhibit when they speak or understand a natural language clearly involves an interaction of various systems such as grammatical knowledge, beliefs, expectations, etc. and the type of answers one will get to this question will very much depend on how the expression study of natural languages is understood. The first methodological assumption that TGG makes is that one particular factor determining this complex behaviour, namely grammatical knowledge, can be studied independently from the others: TGG focuses on this factor, also termed grammatical competence (e.g. the knowledge that certain forms have certain meanings, etc.),and more precisely on the mentally represented system (ultimately physically represented system2) that characterizes this knowledge, termed grammar. In other words, the above question should be more adequately reformulated as: What insights into the formal properties of the mind/brain can the study of grammars provide? Grammars, as defined above, therefore constitute the basic objects of inquiry within this framework, and the study of grammars reduces in part to the construction of explicit models of such grammars. One of the main empirical problems that the study of grammars faces, as soon as some explicit model of a grammar tries to account for very elementary properties of grammatical processes, is the fact that it appears that basic principles governing its organization cannot be inductively inferred from the kind of (even relevant) experience a language learner might have, nor do they appear to be taught in any way since they are for the most part unconscious, for the mature speaker (as is the case e.g. with the structure dependency of transformational rules). How, then, does this knowledge develop? Since the principles governing the organization of grammars do not seem to mirror external structures in any obvious way either, it is reasonable to suppose that the language learner is equipped a priori with some analytic structure in the domain of language development which might be termed Universal Grammar (UG), and whose function is both to select relevant data from the environment and to map them into grammars, thus determining their basic character. Given this body assumptions, it becomes clear how TGG tries to answer the above questions. Since, we assume, UG is a system available to …
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Language	English
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Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article