NOAM CHOMSKY AND GRAMMAR 163
previous chapter are sufficiently general to describe a vast array of sentences, this
array is insignificant in the context of an infinite number ofpossiblesentences.
Sentence 1, which is quite a common sentence, illustrates this point:
- The day was hot.
This sentence reasonably would appear in the corpus of English, as would
sentence 1a:
1a. The day was very hot.We might even imagine sentence 1b in the corpus, because it, too, is rather
common:
1b. The day was very, very hot.At some point, however, we reach the limit of the number ofverys we can put
in front of the adjective and still be congruent with attested utterances. It is un-
likely that anyone has ever uttered this sentence with, say, 53verys. Neverthe-
less, such a sentence would be grammatical. In fact, we can imagine sentence
1c quite easily (wherenequals an infinite number of iterations of the word
very),and we also understand that it is grammatical:
1c. The day was very... nhot.Chomsky correctly observed that phrase-structure grammar did not have the
means to account for our ability to insert an infinite number of adverbial inten-
sifiers(very)in front of the adjective and still have a grammatical sentence. He
concluded that “it is obvious that the set of grammatical sentences cannot be
identified with any particular corpus of utterances obtained by the linguist in
his field work” (1957, p. 15). In other words, a given body of sentences cannot
fully identify a grammar of the language.
Chomsky’s second major criticism focused on our intuitive understanding
that certain types of sentences have some underlying relation, even though they
look quite different from each other. Actives and passive are the most signifi-
cant examples of sentences that we intuitively sense are related. The most com-
mon type of sentence in English follows SVO word order, has an agent as the
subject, and an object, as in sentence 2:
- Macarena kissed Fritz. (active)