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between different dialects and different functional varieties of the same language. They distinguished various levels of English usage, such as standard versus substandard.

As the brief description reveals, the structuralists could not avoid meaning, a component that linguists today insist is inherent in language, Structuralists did, however, give a far morę exact description of the English language than had existed before. And it was this description that shaped both the theory and methods of the teaching approach known as the Audiolingual method.

Structural linguistics is an approach to linguistics which stręsses the importance of language as a system and which inyestigates the place that linguistic units such as sounds, words, sentences have within this system. In its widest sense, the term has been used for various groups of linguists, including those ofthe Prague School, but most often it is used to ref er to a group of American linguists such as Bloomfield and Fries, who published mainly in the 1930s to 1950s. The work of these linguists was based on the theory of behaviourism and had a considerable influence on some language teaching methods (Audiolingual method). (Richards 1992:357)

3.2.3. Generative grammar

Generative grammar is also known as transformational grammar (though designated by various combinations of the words “transformational⁴⁴ and “generative“). 1

It has its roots in studies of the philosophical grammarians who datę from the 17* century. The first principles were described in the publication Syntactic Structures from 1957 by Noam Chomsky.

Generative grammar, as Chomsky States, illustrates that language, because it is based on a system of rules, makes infinite use of finite means. The purpose of grammar is to select the theory or system that best explains these rules. In formulating such a grammar, Chomsky and others have used the term “generate⁴⁴ to indicate that

through ą “rule of substitution“ it is possible to generate sentence pattems that would cover the whole language.

The term “transformational*⁴ refers to a rule that rearranges various elements in a sentence when that sentence is changed from a simple to a morę complicated one.

As Chomsky has pointed out, native speakers can form and understand an infinite number of sentences because they understand the basie, underlying system of the language.

In brief, generative grammar proposes to describe not just existing English sentences but all possible English sentences, and to give an explanation of how native speakers form, or generate, sentences. Using the notions of symbolic logie, generative grammar expresses in formulas the components of phrase structure that constitute simple (kemel) sentences (S — NP + VP) and the transformations that add elements to and rearrange the elements of the simple sentence. It provides formulas for explaining even very complicated structures of present-day English.

Strictly speaking, no real method of teaching emerged under the influence of the Chomskyan “revolution“, but together with cognitive psychology it gave rise to what was later called cognitive codę learning. This, however, never attained the prominence of other above-mentioned methods. This was in part Chomsky's own wish when he announced that his theory referred primarily to native speakers and not to second or foreign language learners, and that his theory could make no contribution to language teaching.

Generative transformational grammar is a theory of grammar that was proposed by the American linguist Chomsky in 1957. It has sińce been developed by him and many other linguists.

(Chomsky attempted to provide a model for the description of all languages, A generative transformational grammar tries to show, with a system of rules, the knowledge which a native speaker of a language uses in forming grammatical sentences. (Richards 1992:387)

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