- Fred kissed Macarena.
The three words of this sentence exist in the lexicon, along with their asso-
ciated features. For example, bothFredandMacarenaare proper nouns and
are singular;kissis a transitive verb marked with the past tense. (These words
have additional features, such as both proper nouns designate people,Fredis
male andMacarenais female,Macarenais a Spanish name, men and women
engage in an act called “kissing,” and so on, but these features aren’t particu-
larly relevant at this point, although they will be in the next chapter, when we
consider association networks.) The computational system selects these
words and combines them using an operation calledmerge,creating a tense
phrase consisting of a verb phrase with two nouns and a verb. To establish
agreement between the verb and the agentive noun and to tense the verb, the
computational system applies an operation calledagree. Next, the agentive
noun must be relocated to the head of the tense phrase. This process is accom-
plished through an operation calledmove. The final operation consists of
what is referred to as a grammar/phonology interface rule calledspelloutthat
produces the target sentence. The MP maintains that these operations govern
all sentences. The diagram on page 190 illustrates the steps in the derivation
and serves as an aid to visualizing the process.
The End of Grammar?
In keeping with the emphasis on universal grammar, Chomsky (1995) pro-
posed that all languages are the same, except for how they form words: “Vari-
ation of language is essentially morphological in character, including the
critical question of which parts of a computation are overtly realized” (p. 7).
This notion is in many respects similar to the traditional views on language
that existed prior to the development of phrase-structure grammar, a point
discussed in chapter 1.
Questions immediately arise from Chomsky’s (1995) proposal. What about
grammar? How can language variation be limited to morphology when, as in the
case of Japanese and English, they have very different grammars? Chomsky’s re-
sponse may seem daring—he eliminated the concept of grammar, per se:
The notion of construction, in the traditional sense, effectively disap-
pears; it is perhaps useful for descriptive taxonomy but has no theoretical
status. Thus, there are no such constructions as Verb Phrase, or interrog-
ative and relative clause, or passive and raising constructions. Rather,
there are just general principles that interact to form these descriptive arti-
facts. (pp. 25–26)NOAM CHOMSKY AND GRAMMAR 189