It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Generative linguistics. (Discuss)

In linguistics, generative grammar generally refers to a proof-theoretical approach to the study of syntax partially inspired by formal grammar theory and pioneered by Noam Chomsky. A generative grammar is a set of rules that recursively "specify" or "generate" the well-formed expressions of a natural language. This encompasses a large set of different approaches to grammar. The term generative grammar is also broadly used to refer to the school of linguistics where this type of formal grammar plays a major part. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. ... Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and someone who engages in this study is called a linguist or linguistician. ... Theoretical linguistics studies diverse questions: how certain languages managed to communicate, what properties all languages have in common, what knowledge a person must have to be able to use a language, and language acquisition. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... Phonology (Greek phone = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics closely associated with phonetics. ... Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ... Syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (syn, meaning co- or together) and τάξις (táxis, meaning sequence, order, arrangement), can be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ... In the main, semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ... Lexical semantics is a field in computer science and linguistics which deals mainly with word meaning. ... The Prototype is what a Stereotype is called in cognitive linguitics. ... Stylistics is the study of style used in literary, and verbal language and the effect the writer/speaker wishes to communicate to the reader/hearer. ... In linguistics, prescription is the laying down or prescribing of normative rules for a language. ... Pragmatics is generally the study of natural language understanding, and specifically the study of how context influences the interpretation of meanings. ... Applied linguistics is concerned with using linguistic theory to address real-world problems. ... Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. ... Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. ... Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. ... Cognitive linguistics is a school of linguistics and cognitive science, which aims to provide accounts of language that mesh well with current understandings of the human mind, and is generally opposed to the more syntactocentric approaches to meaning in generative linguistics. ... Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and logical modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. ... Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is actually spoken now (or how it was actually spoken in the past), by any group of people. ... Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time, by means of examining languages which are recognizably related through similarities such as vocabulary, word formation, and syntax, as well as the surviving records of ancient languages. ... Etymology is the study of the origins of words. ... The following is a list of linguists, those who study linguistics. ... Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and someone who engages in this study is called a linguist or linguistician. ... Proof theory, studied as a branch of mathematical logic, represents proofs as formal mathematical objects, facilitating their analysis by mathematical techniques. ... In computer science a formal grammar is an abstract structure that describes a formal language precisely, i. ... Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is the Institute Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... The term natural language is used to distinguish languages spoken and signed (by hand signals and facial expressions) by humans for general-purpose communication from constructs such as writing, computer-programming languages or the languages used in the study of formal logic, especially mathematical logic. ...

Generative grammar should be distinguished from traditional grammar, which is often strongly prescriptive, rather than purely descriptive, is not mathematically explicit, and has historically investigated a relatively narrow set of syntactic phenomena. In the "school of linguistics" sense it should be distinguished from other linguistically descriptive approaches to grammar, such as various functional theories. Grammar is the discovery, enunciation, and study of rules governing the use of language. ... In linguistics, prescription is the laying down or prescribing of normative rules for a language. ... In linguistics, prescription is the laying down or prescribing of normative rules for a language. ... Functional grammar is the name given to any of a range of functionally-based approaches to the scientific study of language. ...

The term generative grammar can also refer to a particular set of formal rules for a particular language; for example, one may speak of a generative grammar of English. A generative grammar in this sense is a formal device that can enumerate ("generate") all and only the grammatical sentences of a language. In an even narrower sense, a generative grammar is a formal device (or, equivalently, an algorithm) that can be used to decide whether any given sentence is grammatical or not. In linguistics, a sentence is a unit of language, characterised in most languages by the presence of a finite verb. ...

In most cases, a generative grammar is capable of generating an infinite number of strings from a finite set of rules. These properties are desirable for a model of natural language, since human brains are of finite capacity, yet humans can generate and understand a very large number of distinct sentences. Some linguists go so far as to claim that the set of grammatical sentences of any natural language is indeed infinite; however, this is not an empirically falsifiable claim.

Generative grammars can be described and compared with the aid of the Chomsky hierarchy proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s. This sets out a series of types of formal grammars with increasing expressive power. Among the simplest types are the regular grammars (type 3); Chomsky claims that regular languages are not adequate as models for human language, because all human languages allow the embedding of strings within strings in a hierarchical way. The Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars that generate formal languages. ... // Events and trends This map shows two essential global spheres during the Cold War in 1959. ... In computer science a right regular grammar is a formal grammar (N, Σ, P, S) such that all the production rules in P are of one of the following forms: A → a - where A is a non-terminal in N and a is a terminal in Σ A → aB - where A and...

At a higher level of complexity are the context-free grammars (type 2). The derivation of a sentence by a context-free grammar can be depicted as a derivation tree. Linguists working in generative grammar often view such derivation trees as a primary object of study. According to this view, a sentence is not merely a string of words, but rather a tree with subordinate and superordinate branches connected at nodes. In linguistics and computer science, a context-free grammar (CFG) is a formal grammar in which every production rule is of the form V → w where V is a non-terminal symbol and w is a string consisting of terminals and/or non-terminals. ... A tree structure is a way of representing the hierarchical nature of a structure in a graphical form. ... Words has several meanings: words in Unix. ...

Essentially, the tree model works something like this example, in which S is a sentence, D is a determiner, N a noun, V a verb, NP a noun phrase and VP a verb phrase: Determiners are words which quantify or identify nouns. ... A noun, or noun substantive, is a part of speech (a word or phrase) that refers to a person, place, thing, event, substance or quality. ... A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action (bring, read), occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand). Depending on the language, a verb may vary in form according to many factors, possibly including its tense, aspect, mood and voice. ... In linguistics, a noun phrase is a phrase whose Head is a noun. ... A verb phrase (VP) is a phrase whose head is a verb. ...

 S /  NP VP /  /  D N V NP The dog ate /  D N the bone 

The resulting sentence could be The dog ate the bone. Such a tree diagram is also called a phrase marker. They can be represented more conveniently in a text form, (though the result is less easy to read); in this format the above sentence would be rendered as:

 [S [NP [D The ] [N dog ] ] [VP [V ate ] [NP [D the ] [N bone ] ] ] ] 

However Chomsky at some point argued that phrase structure grammars are also inadequate for describing natural languages. To address this, Chomsky formulated the more complex system of transformational grammar. Transformational grammar is a broad term describing grammars (almost exclusively those of natural languages) which have been developed in a Chomskian tradition. ...

When generative grammar was first proposed, it was widely hailed as a way of formalizing the implicit set of rules a person "knows" when they know their native language and produce grammatical utterances in it. However Chomsky has repeatedly rejected that interpretation; according to him, the grammar of a language is a statement of what it is that a person has to know in order to recognise an utterance as grammatical, but not a hypothesis about the processes involved in either understanding or producing language. In any case the reality is that most native speakers would reject many sentences produced even by a phrase structure grammar. For example, although very deep embeddings are allowed by the grammar, sentences with deep embeddings are not accepted by listeners, and the limit of acceptability is an empirical matter that varies between individuals, not something that can be easily captured in a formal grammar. Consequently, the influence of generative grammar in empirical psycholinguistics has declined considerably. Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. ...

Generative grammar has been used in music theory and analysis such as by Fred Lerdahl and in Schenkerian analysis. See: Chord progression#Rewrite rules. Music theory is a field of study that describes the elements of music and includes the development and application of methods for analyzing and composing music, and the interrelationship between the notation of music and performance practice. ... Musical analysis can be defined as a process attempting to answer the question how does this music work?. The method employed to answer this question, and indeed exactly what is meant by the question, differs from analyst to analyst. ... Fred Lerdahl, Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, is a composer and music theorist, best known for his work on pitch space and cognitive constraints on compositional systems or musical grammars. ... Schenkerian analysis is an approach to musical analysis devised by Heinrich Schenker. ... A chord progression (also chord sequence and harmonic progression or sequence), as its name implies, is a series of chords played in an order. ...

Automata theory is a field of computer science which studies finite state machines, by means of mathematical representations of them (automata, Turing machines). ... In mathematics, logic and computer science, a formal language is a set of finite-length words (i. ... In computer science a formal grammar is an abstract structure that describes a formal language precisely, i. ... The Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars that generate formal languages. ... The Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars that generate formal languages. ... In computer science a formal grammar is an abstract structure that describes a formal language precisely, i. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Deterministic finite state machine. ... A recursively enumerable language in mathematics, logic and computer science, is a type of formal language which is also called recursively enumerable, partially decidable or Turing-recognizable. ... An artistic representation of a Turing Machine . ... A recursive language in mathematics, logic and computer science, is a type of formal language which is also called recursive, decidable or Turing-decidable. ... In computability theory, a machine that always halts — also called a decider (Sipser, 1996) — is any abstract machine or model of computation that, contrary to the most general Turing machines, is guaranteed to halt for any particular description and input (see halting problem). ... A context-sensitive grammar is a formal grammar G = (N, Σ, P, S) such that all rules in P are of the form αAβ → αγβ with A in N (i. ... A context-sensitive language is a formal language that can be defined by a context-sensitive grammar. ... A linear bounded automaton (plural linear bounded automata, abbreviated LBA) is a restricted form of a Turing machine. ... In linguistics and computer science, a context-free grammar (CFG) is a formal grammar in which every production rule is of the form V → w where V is a non-terminal symbol and w is a string consisting of terminals and/or non-terminals. ... A context-free language is a formal language that is accepted by some pushdown automaton. ... In automata theory, pushdown automata (PDA) are abstract devices that recognize context-free languages. ... In computer science a right regular grammar is a formal grammar (N, Σ, P, S) such that all the production rules in P are of one of the following forms: A → a - where A is a non-terminal in N and a is a terminal in Σ A → aB - where A and... A regular language is a formal language (i. ... In the theory of computation, a finite state machine (FSM) or finite state automaton (FSA) is an abstract machine that has only a finite, constant amount of memory. ... A is a subset of B, and B is a superset of A. In mathematics, especially in set theory, a set A is a subset of a set B, if A is contained inside B. Every set is a subset of itself. ...

See also

• Cognitive linguistics
• Optimality Theory
• Parsing