This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Generative grammar article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
This
level-5 vital article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Tuf80688.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 22:11, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
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
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. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.139.20.191 ( talk) 17:42, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
Are you kidding? You are one of those chomsky haters for sure. This is 2017 and we are still actively working on this unique theory throughout the world with over 2000 researchers. Linguist91 ( talk) 07:24, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Could someone go through the article of Ad Neeleman? I came across it referencing unreferenced BLPs. the article states that Neeleman is part 'of the tradition of generative grammar' (but I couldn't find him here). Secondary sources establishing notability and extra information however would be welcome. Should he not pass WP:notability (academics), a deletion proposal might be in order; but I am not capable of adding or further judging this... L.tak ( talk) 00:49, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
I think we should study to have a historical sense. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.154.125.226 ( talk) 12:48, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
I noticed that when I create a pdf version of this article, the subsubsection 1.1.6 is not listed. I guess it is because it only contains a link to the main article on Minimalist program. Now, this whole section acts as a list of subsequent stages of Chomskian linguistics, so the title of this subsubsection should definitely be included in the offline version. How do I achieve that? Anša ( talk) 23:36, 16 January 2012 (UTC)
In view of the fact that the generative school of thought is highly debated in linguistics, it is a bit surprising there is no section devoted to the criticism of the theory. I am no specialist in the history of the critique, but it would be useful if someone added such information. It is also somewhat misleading to include some theories such as Dependency Grammars as part of Generative Grammar, when from the outset some of them were designed as a critique of the generative view. בוקי סריקי ( talk) 16:06, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
Absolutely agree with the above. Why should this article be immune from the criticism which would routinely be a part of any other article discussing a current, and heavily contested, theory. As well, consider that any theory that changes itself so often – six major revisions/adaptations in thirty years or so – is probably misconceived in the first place. For a detailed critique of the inability of any of Chomsky's versions, or those of his acolytes to deal adequately with semantics, see John Ellis, Language, Thought, and Logic (Northwestern UP, 1993), who argues that the whole attempt to divorce syntax from semantics, stemming from Chomsky's initial Standard Theory, is a basic error which no amount of reconfiguration of the theory can fix (Chapter 8). Looked at this way, the swerve into politics might be interpreted an attempt to avoid dealing with the problems of the theory. Note also that the debate in the section above, "A small point of detail," circles around exactly this issue, and fails to come to conclusion, mostly because it can't, except to repeat Chomsky' obiter dicta, that synatax and semantics can have no connection. Theonemacduff ( talk) 06:18, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
This has to be changed. Chomsky states that's it not a theory but a program, hence the name. "Chomsky presents MP as a program, not as a theory, following Imre Lakatos's distinction." - Wikipedia. Why was it written on this page that it's a theory? When jumping to MP page it says that it's not a theory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Senethys ( talk • contribs) 10:34, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
In the subsection "Standard Theory (1957–1965)" we have the following sentence and no other publication cited for this interval: "The so-called Standard Theory corresponds to the original model of generative grammar laid out in Chomsky (1965)." To me it is not clear why the time interval should start at 1957, if there hasn't been any publication before 1965. If it is meant that Chomsky and other scholars only started working at that theory in 1957, then this should be made clear. If this is not meant, then there should be cited a publication in 1957. Indeed, Syntactic Structures was published in 1957.
Garrafao ( talk) 16:08, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
It is somewhat surprising that this page describes none of the criticisms of the generative approach, which span the beginning (e.g. Hockett, Robert Hall) until now (e.g. Dan Everett). Of course detailed discussion of critics at every moment wouldn't be appropriate, but presenting the whole school as essentially unchallenged is certainly POV. Tibetologist ( talk) 06:06, 7 February 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Generative grammar. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 18 January 2022).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 04:50, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
Whatever about the verb phrase has been said is totally abusive. Nothing is clear-cut. A short of Greshm's rule is applied on the modern learning. Under the name of Generative Grammar every discipline of English Grammar has been polluted. Your so-called Generative Grammar is rubbish. Your Chomsky is rubbish. Birbal Kumawat ( talk) 18:37, 24 December 2017 (UTC)
I undid edits made by User:Botterweg14 on March 3, 2020 because these consisted of the deletion of most of the sourced information on the page. Wikipedia is meant to be a site for information on science, and this includes descriptions and criticisms. It is useful to know the background of generative grammar and its differences from the previous structuralist models to understand what it is all about. It is likewise necessary for people to be able to find out whether scientific claims made by generative grammarians are founded on research. While some restructuring is possible, it is not possible to remove well-sourced information only because it is uncomfortable. Weidorje ( talk) 08:37, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
Botterweg14 ( talk) 14:07, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
I'd like to request comment on the "lack of evidence" section as well as the lede. I am concerned about their current form for reasons I have laid out above. Botterweg14 ( talk) 17:47, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
In this section, I'm carrying down my concerns about the article so that they're all clearly stated in one place.
"Neuroscientific studies using ERPs found no indication that human mind processes grammatical objects as if they were placed inside the verb phrase.[11] The validity of the innatism claim was called into question in 1993,[11] and since then the scientists who carried out the research have no longer made use of the generative model, instead relying on a simple, more general processing model.[12]"
Goedemorgen, Botterweg14 and y'all! So, we are now making a revision of the Criticism section, and it's been agreed that there are no edits until we've reached a consensus. My vision of the article is that it will give people critical information of Generative grammar because this is an approach that made some interesting claims in the 1960s, but there was eventually no evidence for any of them. The approach however remains quite influential. Many people would wait for GG to fade away in a natural course (Chomsky is now 91 years old), but WP obviously needs to provide information to people on a daily basis. These people would include students and education providers, among others, who would be able to prepare for changes beforehand.
But information needs to be accurate and in line with the WP guidelines. This is somewhat difficult because journals don't publish articles claiming "there is no evidence" for something on a regular basis. Likewise, reference volumes don't usually list things that are not based on research, but rather tell you what are. I think there will be a small number of papers, however, that we'll be able to use as directly critical sources.
Starting with the first 'issue' which is that of purported lack of linguistic evidence for GG. The background here is in Chomsky's rejection of behavioural psychology. He claimed to have found linguistic evidence that proves that children do not learn syntactic structures, but 'acquire' them from 'UG' which is hard-wired in the brain. Note that there was no brain research done.
The current version stands as follows.
Noam Chomsky, the creator of generative grammar, believed to have found linguistic evidence that syntactic structures are not learned but ‘acquired’ by the child from Universal Grammar. This led to the establishment of the poverty of the stimulus argument. It was later found, however, that Chomsky's linguistic analysis was inadequate. [1]
Pullum and Scholz's article has been commented by others. This paper explains it as follows.
"Example 2b: Is the man who is eating hungry?
An alternative rule would be to move the first occurring auxiliary, that is, the one in the relative clause, which would produce the form
Example 2c Is the man who eating is hungry?
In some sense, there is no reason that children should favour the correct rule, rather than the incorrect one, since they are both of similar complexity and so on. Yet children do in fact, when provided with the appropriate context, produce sentences of the form of Example 2b, and rarely if ever produce errors of the form Example 2c (Crain and Nakayama, 1987). The problem is how to account for this phenomenon. Chomsky claimed first, that sentences of the type in Example 2b are vanishingly rare in the linguistic environment that children are exposed to, yet when tested they unfailingly produce the correct form rather than the incorrect Example 2c. This is put forward as strong evidence in favour of innately specified language specific knowledge: we shall refer to this view as linguistic nativism.
In a special volume of the Linguistic Review, Pullum and Scholz (2002) showed that in fact sentences of this type are not rare at all. Much discussion ensued on this empirical question and the consequences of this in the context of arguments for linguistic nativism. These debates revolved around both the methodology employed in the study, and also the consequences of such claims for nativist theories. It is fair to say that in spite of the strength of Pullum and Scholz’s arguments, nativists remained completely unconvinced by the overall argument."
Sure they did. However, I think it is quite correct to say that Chomsky's linguistic analysis was inadequate, based on Pullum & Scholz 2002. By 'inadequate' I mean that it was not false per se, but the claim that such sentence structures are not included in the 'positive data' received by the child was pointed out to be false by Pullum & Scholz. Weidorje ( talk) 08:34, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
In the article, it is stated that there is no proof when it comes to the existence of generative grammar. However, it is a misconception that confuses both pyschology and neurology. That is, generative grammar does NOT try to be the theory of neurology. Instead, it aims to be a part of cognitive psychology, which is consequently fair to ask whether these rules really exist in the brain. To be more precise, how can one find a real description of GG in the brain, meanwhile there are tons of neurons firing away there? That means, neurology examines concreteness, but cognitive psychology aims to model the abstract events in the mind whose results can be realized concretely(for example, memory, perception and so on) and this is exactly what GG wants to do, since one can of course not find the real concrete language rules by studying in the field of neurology. Kuzeytaylan ( talk) 00:03, 24 June 2020 (UTC)
Exactly, one can not find the real evidence in the brain concretely. Notwithstanding, we can, for example, provide an evidence for how subjects are derivated for the first time(or for non-generativists, seen for the first time) under the tense phrase and undergo a movement to the Spec,TP position. For example, “The kids are all in the garden.” and “There are all the kids in the garden”. When there is an expletive subject in the sentence, the real subject cannot undergo a movement to that position(2. Sentence), but when there is not one, then the subject can go up there(1. sentence) and may there leave “all” or bring it too(for example, all the kids are in the garden.). What I mean here is that this is how the modelling is. That is, this is the concrete result of movement, but how this processing is really represented in the mind is for now unknown. There may be something different, but the result can be seen in the examples. Kuzeytaylan ( talk) 00:11, 25 June 2020 (UTC)
Concerning recent edits made by Kuzeytaylan. Some of it was good because now it's clear what the problem with the research was. Next, you're claiming that the research however proved that constituents are cognitive. I'm not arguing that they aren't, but I don't suppose the research you're citing was on that topic. I'll check it soon. Next, you're claiming that the sources don't contain the information that GG was rejected (and pushed into the margins, as it said before your edits). Now, why are you doing that because the matter was already discussed above? I'm duplicating some of it here:
You should not have removed the criticism. Weidorje ( talk) 07:01, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
First of all, I did not understand why you deleted the information in the first section that says that neurology is not concerned with how mind works(concerning GG). This is a significant misconception. That is why it was crucial to point out that it is pyshcology under which the theory is considered to be real. Otherwise, how is it possible to find a concrete process of merging of a verb and a noun etc.? It is as if GG claims to be a theory of neurology but neurology did not find any evidence so GG is not real. Also, how is it possible that you don’t suppose the article which i cited is about words being realized as constituents? You should not have deleted it without reading the article. Kuzeytaylan ( talk) 10:31, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
I even cited GG’s being a theory of psychology from a book, but you also deleted it, which was an important distinction. It therefore seems that you want GG to be considered a totally fake theory, although there are supportive evidences. There are of course critics about them, but these are also another point of views, but you write them as if the critics were right, so GG was false. That is why I kept changing your writings. Kuzeytaylan ( talk) 10:43, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
I at the same time want to thank your for your attention. Kuzeytaylan ( talk) 10:48, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
I read all of your comments, thank you again. I am unfortunately unable to continue writing since i am on the phone and it is hard to discuss like this. I’d really like to talk to you about these issues. Kuzeytaylan ( talk) 12:40, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
Hi all! Currently, the lead of the article states that "[Generative Grammar] is a sociobiological modification of structuralist theories", and cites the article "Sociobiology and You" to support this claim. I don't think that source supports that claim. The closest that the source gets to to supporting this claim, in my opinion, is seen here:
"Trained as a linguistic psychologist whose specialist work has focused on irregular verbs, Pinker has made a name for himself as one of evolutionary psychology’s most appealing ambassadors, with a series of bestselling books summarizing an astonishingly wide body of work: The Language Instinct (1994) looked at the mental module for language processing, first proposed several decades ago in Chomsky’s idea of a generative grammar underlying all human language, and refined by subsequent developments in neuroscience and evolutionary theory."
So the article only supports a weaker claim, there exists a mental module for language processing, rather than generative grammar as a whole being supported; and even that module is merely supported by neuroscience and evolutionary theory, rather than these being primary motivators for Generative Grammar, which I think is suggested by the phrasing "[Generative Grammar] is a sociobiological modification of structuralist theories". Because of this, I'm leaning towards removing that reference (as it does not seem relevant to the claim made here), but I wanted to check what other people think before removing a properly formatted citation. Alternatively, we could rephrase the claim to something like "Some aspects of generative grammar, such as the idea of a language module, have been influenced by developments in neuroscience and evolutionary theory". Thanks for reading! JonathanHopeThisIsUnique ( talk) 02:17, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
Generative grammar and generative linguistics should be two separate articles. Generative grammar is just about the tecnical concept, while generative linguistics is a more general article about the linguistic approach/paradigm, its epistemiological/philosophical assumptions and foundations, history, subfields, and relationship with other approaches.-- OpenNotes1 ( talk) 22:56, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
The content from this revision should be restored as a working point, as it contains some proper information about the approach of generative linguistics in general, not about the tecnical concept.-- OpenNotes1 ( talk) 23:39, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
Is 'generative grammar' written with or without caps? This article changes randomly between the two; there are even instances of one element being capitalized but not the other.-- Megaman en m ( talk) 21:49, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
I understand that this theory is mostly obsolete and is not accepted/ proved by linguists in general anymore, but the language of the page is highly negative (with uses of words such as "so-called", for example). This feels unnecessary and the comment of Chomsky saying that "it's only a theory that will be understood later on" feels more like a personal opinion rather than anything that is pertinent to the theory itself. 267 17:06, 26 March 2022 (UTC)
There should be plenty of criticism cited here. The paper cited at the end of the opening section, Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language, is not representative of it, nor does it hold up to any scrutiny. It's not published anywhere and clearly motivated by some extra-scholastic factors.
To serve the topic the link tries to provide: I would suggest there can even be a section disambiguating the goals and results of LLMs vs. the goals and results of human language theory. But the current article cited doesn't even address the same question the theory is attempting to: Chomsky's theory tries to answer how do humans arrive at their grammar that produces language, whereas this paper is focused on how a different computational process simulated human language - the result, not the how. 100.2.102.27 ( talk) 23:29, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Generative grammar article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
This
level-5 vital article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Tuf80688.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 22:11, 16 January 2022 (UTC)
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
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. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.139.20.191 ( talk) 17:42, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
Are you kidding? You are one of those chomsky haters for sure. This is 2017 and we are still actively working on this unique theory throughout the world with over 2000 researchers. Linguist91 ( talk) 07:24, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Could someone go through the article of Ad Neeleman? I came across it referencing unreferenced BLPs. the article states that Neeleman is part 'of the tradition of generative grammar' (but I couldn't find him here). Secondary sources establishing notability and extra information however would be welcome. Should he not pass WP:notability (academics), a deletion proposal might be in order; but I am not capable of adding or further judging this... L.tak ( talk) 00:49, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
I think we should study to have a historical sense. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.154.125.226 ( talk) 12:48, 31 August 2011 (UTC)
I noticed that when I create a pdf version of this article, the subsubsection 1.1.6 is not listed. I guess it is because it only contains a link to the main article on Minimalist program. Now, this whole section acts as a list of subsequent stages of Chomskian linguistics, so the title of this subsubsection should definitely be included in the offline version. How do I achieve that? Anša ( talk) 23:36, 16 January 2012 (UTC)
In view of the fact that the generative school of thought is highly debated in linguistics, it is a bit surprising there is no section devoted to the criticism of the theory. I am no specialist in the history of the critique, but it would be useful if someone added such information. It is also somewhat misleading to include some theories such as Dependency Grammars as part of Generative Grammar, when from the outset some of them were designed as a critique of the generative view. בוקי סריקי ( talk) 16:06, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
Absolutely agree with the above. Why should this article be immune from the criticism which would routinely be a part of any other article discussing a current, and heavily contested, theory. As well, consider that any theory that changes itself so often – six major revisions/adaptations in thirty years or so – is probably misconceived in the first place. For a detailed critique of the inability of any of Chomsky's versions, or those of his acolytes to deal adequately with semantics, see John Ellis, Language, Thought, and Logic (Northwestern UP, 1993), who argues that the whole attempt to divorce syntax from semantics, stemming from Chomsky's initial Standard Theory, is a basic error which no amount of reconfiguration of the theory can fix (Chapter 8). Looked at this way, the swerve into politics might be interpreted an attempt to avoid dealing with the problems of the theory. Note also that the debate in the section above, "A small point of detail," circles around exactly this issue, and fails to come to conclusion, mostly because it can't, except to repeat Chomsky' obiter dicta, that synatax and semantics can have no connection. Theonemacduff ( talk) 06:18, 2 June 2014 (UTC)
This has to be changed. Chomsky states that's it not a theory but a program, hence the name. "Chomsky presents MP as a program, not as a theory, following Imre Lakatos's distinction." - Wikipedia. Why was it written on this page that it's a theory? When jumping to MP page it says that it's not a theory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Senethys ( talk • contribs) 10:34, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
In the subsection "Standard Theory (1957–1965)" we have the following sentence and no other publication cited for this interval: "The so-called Standard Theory corresponds to the original model of generative grammar laid out in Chomsky (1965)." To me it is not clear why the time interval should start at 1957, if there hasn't been any publication before 1965. If it is meant that Chomsky and other scholars only started working at that theory in 1957, then this should be made clear. If this is not meant, then there should be cited a publication in 1957. Indeed, Syntactic Structures was published in 1957.
Garrafao ( talk) 16:08, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
It is somewhat surprising that this page describes none of the criticisms of the generative approach, which span the beginning (e.g. Hockett, Robert Hall) until now (e.g. Dan Everett). Of course detailed discussion of critics at every moment wouldn't be appropriate, but presenting the whole school as essentially unchallenged is certainly POV. Tibetologist ( talk) 06:06, 7 February 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Generative grammar. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 18 January 2022).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 04:50, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
Whatever about the verb phrase has been said is totally abusive. Nothing is clear-cut. A short of Greshm's rule is applied on the modern learning. Under the name of Generative Grammar every discipline of English Grammar has been polluted. Your so-called Generative Grammar is rubbish. Your Chomsky is rubbish. Birbal Kumawat ( talk) 18:37, 24 December 2017 (UTC)
I undid edits made by User:Botterweg14 on March 3, 2020 because these consisted of the deletion of most of the sourced information on the page. Wikipedia is meant to be a site for information on science, and this includes descriptions and criticisms. It is useful to know the background of generative grammar and its differences from the previous structuralist models to understand what it is all about. It is likewise necessary for people to be able to find out whether scientific claims made by generative grammarians are founded on research. While some restructuring is possible, it is not possible to remove well-sourced information only because it is uncomfortable. Weidorje ( talk) 08:37, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
Botterweg14 ( talk) 14:07, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
I'd like to request comment on the "lack of evidence" section as well as the lede. I am concerned about their current form for reasons I have laid out above. Botterweg14 ( talk) 17:47, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
In this section, I'm carrying down my concerns about the article so that they're all clearly stated in one place.
"Neuroscientific studies using ERPs found no indication that human mind processes grammatical objects as if they were placed inside the verb phrase.[11] The validity of the innatism claim was called into question in 1993,[11] and since then the scientists who carried out the research have no longer made use of the generative model, instead relying on a simple, more general processing model.[12]"
Goedemorgen, Botterweg14 and y'all! So, we are now making a revision of the Criticism section, and it's been agreed that there are no edits until we've reached a consensus. My vision of the article is that it will give people critical information of Generative grammar because this is an approach that made some interesting claims in the 1960s, but there was eventually no evidence for any of them. The approach however remains quite influential. Many people would wait for GG to fade away in a natural course (Chomsky is now 91 years old), but WP obviously needs to provide information to people on a daily basis. These people would include students and education providers, among others, who would be able to prepare for changes beforehand.
But information needs to be accurate and in line with the WP guidelines. This is somewhat difficult because journals don't publish articles claiming "there is no evidence" for something on a regular basis. Likewise, reference volumes don't usually list things that are not based on research, but rather tell you what are. I think there will be a small number of papers, however, that we'll be able to use as directly critical sources.
Starting with the first 'issue' which is that of purported lack of linguistic evidence for GG. The background here is in Chomsky's rejection of behavioural psychology. He claimed to have found linguistic evidence that proves that children do not learn syntactic structures, but 'acquire' them from 'UG' which is hard-wired in the brain. Note that there was no brain research done.
The current version stands as follows.
Noam Chomsky, the creator of generative grammar, believed to have found linguistic evidence that syntactic structures are not learned but ‘acquired’ by the child from Universal Grammar. This led to the establishment of the poverty of the stimulus argument. It was later found, however, that Chomsky's linguistic analysis was inadequate. [1]
Pullum and Scholz's article has been commented by others. This paper explains it as follows.
"Example 2b: Is the man who is eating hungry?
An alternative rule would be to move the first occurring auxiliary, that is, the one in the relative clause, which would produce the form
Example 2c Is the man who eating is hungry?
In some sense, there is no reason that children should favour the correct rule, rather than the incorrect one, since they are both of similar complexity and so on. Yet children do in fact, when provided with the appropriate context, produce sentences of the form of Example 2b, and rarely if ever produce errors of the form Example 2c (Crain and Nakayama, 1987). The problem is how to account for this phenomenon. Chomsky claimed first, that sentences of the type in Example 2b are vanishingly rare in the linguistic environment that children are exposed to, yet when tested they unfailingly produce the correct form rather than the incorrect Example 2c. This is put forward as strong evidence in favour of innately specified language specific knowledge: we shall refer to this view as linguistic nativism.
In a special volume of the Linguistic Review, Pullum and Scholz (2002) showed that in fact sentences of this type are not rare at all. Much discussion ensued on this empirical question and the consequences of this in the context of arguments for linguistic nativism. These debates revolved around both the methodology employed in the study, and also the consequences of such claims for nativist theories. It is fair to say that in spite of the strength of Pullum and Scholz’s arguments, nativists remained completely unconvinced by the overall argument."
Sure they did. However, I think it is quite correct to say that Chomsky's linguistic analysis was inadequate, based on Pullum & Scholz 2002. By 'inadequate' I mean that it was not false per se, but the claim that such sentence structures are not included in the 'positive data' received by the child was pointed out to be false by Pullum & Scholz. Weidorje ( talk) 08:34, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
In the article, it is stated that there is no proof when it comes to the existence of generative grammar. However, it is a misconception that confuses both pyschology and neurology. That is, generative grammar does NOT try to be the theory of neurology. Instead, it aims to be a part of cognitive psychology, which is consequently fair to ask whether these rules really exist in the brain. To be more precise, how can one find a real description of GG in the brain, meanwhile there are tons of neurons firing away there? That means, neurology examines concreteness, but cognitive psychology aims to model the abstract events in the mind whose results can be realized concretely(for example, memory, perception and so on) and this is exactly what GG wants to do, since one can of course not find the real concrete language rules by studying in the field of neurology. Kuzeytaylan ( talk) 00:03, 24 June 2020 (UTC)
Exactly, one can not find the real evidence in the brain concretely. Notwithstanding, we can, for example, provide an evidence for how subjects are derivated for the first time(or for non-generativists, seen for the first time) under the tense phrase and undergo a movement to the Spec,TP position. For example, “The kids are all in the garden.” and “There are all the kids in the garden”. When there is an expletive subject in the sentence, the real subject cannot undergo a movement to that position(2. Sentence), but when there is not one, then the subject can go up there(1. sentence) and may there leave “all” or bring it too(for example, all the kids are in the garden.). What I mean here is that this is how the modelling is. That is, this is the concrete result of movement, but how this processing is really represented in the mind is for now unknown. There may be something different, but the result can be seen in the examples. Kuzeytaylan ( talk) 00:11, 25 June 2020 (UTC)
Concerning recent edits made by Kuzeytaylan. Some of it was good because now it's clear what the problem with the research was. Next, you're claiming that the research however proved that constituents are cognitive. I'm not arguing that they aren't, but I don't suppose the research you're citing was on that topic. I'll check it soon. Next, you're claiming that the sources don't contain the information that GG was rejected (and pushed into the margins, as it said before your edits). Now, why are you doing that because the matter was already discussed above? I'm duplicating some of it here:
You should not have removed the criticism. Weidorje ( talk) 07:01, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
First of all, I did not understand why you deleted the information in the first section that says that neurology is not concerned with how mind works(concerning GG). This is a significant misconception. That is why it was crucial to point out that it is pyshcology under which the theory is considered to be real. Otherwise, how is it possible to find a concrete process of merging of a verb and a noun etc.? It is as if GG claims to be a theory of neurology but neurology did not find any evidence so GG is not real. Also, how is it possible that you don’t suppose the article which i cited is about words being realized as constituents? You should not have deleted it without reading the article. Kuzeytaylan ( talk) 10:31, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
I even cited GG’s being a theory of psychology from a book, but you also deleted it, which was an important distinction. It therefore seems that you want GG to be considered a totally fake theory, although there are supportive evidences. There are of course critics about them, but these are also another point of views, but you write them as if the critics were right, so GG was false. That is why I kept changing your writings. Kuzeytaylan ( talk) 10:43, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
I at the same time want to thank your for your attention. Kuzeytaylan ( talk) 10:48, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
I read all of your comments, thank you again. I am unfortunately unable to continue writing since i am on the phone and it is hard to discuss like this. I’d really like to talk to you about these issues. Kuzeytaylan ( talk) 12:40, 10 September 2020 (UTC)
Hi all! Currently, the lead of the article states that "[Generative Grammar] is a sociobiological modification of structuralist theories", and cites the article "Sociobiology and You" to support this claim. I don't think that source supports that claim. The closest that the source gets to to supporting this claim, in my opinion, is seen here:
"Trained as a linguistic psychologist whose specialist work has focused on irregular verbs, Pinker has made a name for himself as one of evolutionary psychology’s most appealing ambassadors, with a series of bestselling books summarizing an astonishingly wide body of work: The Language Instinct (1994) looked at the mental module for language processing, first proposed several decades ago in Chomsky’s idea of a generative grammar underlying all human language, and refined by subsequent developments in neuroscience and evolutionary theory."
So the article only supports a weaker claim, there exists a mental module for language processing, rather than generative grammar as a whole being supported; and even that module is merely supported by neuroscience and evolutionary theory, rather than these being primary motivators for Generative Grammar, which I think is suggested by the phrasing "[Generative Grammar] is a sociobiological modification of structuralist theories". Because of this, I'm leaning towards removing that reference (as it does not seem relevant to the claim made here), but I wanted to check what other people think before removing a properly formatted citation. Alternatively, we could rephrase the claim to something like "Some aspects of generative grammar, such as the idea of a language module, have been influenced by developments in neuroscience and evolutionary theory". Thanks for reading! JonathanHopeThisIsUnique ( talk) 02:17, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
Generative grammar and generative linguistics should be two separate articles. Generative grammar is just about the tecnical concept, while generative linguistics is a more general article about the linguistic approach/paradigm, its epistemiological/philosophical assumptions and foundations, history, subfields, and relationship with other approaches.-- OpenNotes1 ( talk) 22:56, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
The content from this revision should be restored as a working point, as it contains some proper information about the approach of generative linguistics in general, not about the tecnical concept.-- OpenNotes1 ( talk) 23:39, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
Is 'generative grammar' written with or without caps? This article changes randomly between the two; there are even instances of one element being capitalized but not the other.-- Megaman en m ( talk) 21:49, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
I understand that this theory is mostly obsolete and is not accepted/ proved by linguists in general anymore, but the language of the page is highly negative (with uses of words such as "so-called", for example). This feels unnecessary and the comment of Chomsky saying that "it's only a theory that will be understood later on" feels more like a personal opinion rather than anything that is pertinent to the theory itself. 267 17:06, 26 March 2022 (UTC)
There should be plenty of criticism cited here. The paper cited at the end of the opening section, Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language, is not representative of it, nor does it hold up to any scrutiny. It's not published anywhere and clearly motivated by some extra-scholastic factors.
To serve the topic the link tries to provide: I would suggest there can even be a section disambiguating the goals and results of LLMs vs. the goals and results of human language theory. But the current article cited doesn't even address the same question the theory is attempting to: Chomsky's theory tries to answer how do humans arrive at their grammar that produces language, whereas this paper is focused on how a different computational process simulated human language - the result, not the how. 100.2.102.27 ( talk) 23:29, 21 February 2024 (UTC)