LECTURE 15

1. 'Syntactic Structures' & Transformational Grammar:

• syntax of a language is characterized by a formal grammar,

• a formal grammar allows the speaker to produce an infinite number of language structures and the hearer - to understand them; it accounts for language productivity and creativity (GENERATIVE GRAMMAR),

• Language Acquisition Device (LAD) - the human capacity to acquire languages,

• Chomsky put forth a suggestion to discover what LAD is and whether it links in any way the range of possible human languages (the general, language features are referred to as UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR = 'the innate body of linguistic knowledge').

2. Noam Chomsky - father of modern linguistic (born 1928).

3. Language is:

• a system of communication,

• a set of sentences.

4. There are languages within languages. For example, English can be seen as an umbrella term for many varieties of it (e.g.: American: Californians; British: Londoners; Australians: Sidenysiders) and sub-varieties, e.g.:

• Did you eat yet? - grammatically correct according to most US languages,

• Have you eaten yet? - grammatically correct according to Londoners.

Even within each variety (e.g.: Londoners), we may distinguish language sub-varieties associated with age groups, social status, educational background, etc.

English of the past and modern England can also be viewed as two different languages, e.g.: Shakespearean language:

• Wherefore to Dover? Wast thou not charged at peril (...)/King Lear.

5. Describing languages:

• means indicating, for every sequence of words, whether or not that sequence counts as a grammatical sentence of a language, /Burton-Roberts, 1997,

• we speak an infinite language,

• language is an infinite set of sentences.

6. Describing infinite languages:

• Chomsky refers to the human capacity to speak and understand the language as an infinite set of sentences as language competence,

• to describe a particular language, you have to give a general definition of the concept of grammatical sentence for that language,

• it is by means of rules that we can give finite descriptions to infinite sets of sentences.

7. GRAMMAR - is a description of language.

8. A natural language...:

• is an infinite set of sentences,

• the function of a grammar of a language is to specify which word sequences are, and which are not, in the infinite set of its sentence,

• it is the complexity of natural language sentences (their structure) that makes it possible to construct an infinity of sentences, and it is the infinity of natural languages that makes a general definition of a sentence necessary in order to describe the grammar of a language,

• sentences of a natural language are complex, but they share certain features with one another, which makes it possible to state general principles (rules) about them,

• the complexity of natural language sentences makes a general definition of 'sentence' both possible and necessary,

• a grammar is a description of a language by means of a general definition of sentence in that language.

It:

• admits as a sentence whatever conforms to the rules,

• gives a structural description of whatever it admits as a sentence,

• explains ungrammatically of sentences.