Linguistics 490--Chomsky
Chomsky on Generativism
• “By a
generative grammar I mean simply a system
of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. . . . Perhaps the issue can be clarified by an analogy to a part of chemical theory concerned with the structurally possible compounds. This
theory might be said to generate
all physically possible compounds just as a grammar generates all grammatically ‘possible’ utterances” (Noam Chomsky, LW 39).