Generative Grammar Theories in American Descriptive Linguistics

Abstract

У статті подано аналіз генеративної парадигми розвитку граматичних теорій американської дескриптивної лінгвістики. Генеративна граматика має вигляд монолітної, але за її межами знаходиться велика кількість альтернативних підходів. Трансформаційні теорії ранніх генеративних граматик дали розвиток багатьом сучасним генеративним теоріям, які базуються на досягненнях функціональних теорій мови останніх років.

The article treats generative paradigm in developing different trends of Grammar theories viewed from analytic methodology of American descriptive linguistics. It reveals some alternative generative approaches to syntactic studies, which involved different “transformation theories” at their earlier stages. The Standard theory was immediately subjected to intensive criticism and evaluation. As a clear-cut distinction between optional and obligatory transformations becomes vague, the difference between kernel structures and transforms practically fades away. Rather, transformation markers determine different types of transformations. Instead of the morphophonemic rules later interpretations contained non-phonological component; phrase structure rules were extended into bare rules, which were divided into phrase structure rewriting rules and a lexicon. Transformational rules remained unchanged. And as for the semantic component, it had no counterparts. The main subjects of the extended standard theory are syntactic constraints, generalized phrase structures. The problem was that models of Transformational grammar that linguists were using did not have intermediate categories. Further revisions and technical innovations such as introduction of “empty categories”, “X-bar theory”, “D- and S-structures”, and conditions on representations such as “Case filter” led to the Revised extended standard theory, in which the grammatical models were greatly simplified. It should be noted that the approach suggested within descriptive linguistics for syntactic studies is of use for machine translation since it may lay the foundation for formalized symbolic syntactic description. Issues of text processing and further transferring texts to machines have become the subject of a field of linguistics called machine translation. Principles and parameters are key-terms for generative linguistics nowadays which imparts much from functional theories of language.