generative grammarn
a type of grammar that attempts to define and describe by a set of rules or
principles all the grammatical sentences of a language and no ungram-
matical ones. This type of grammar is said to generate, or produce, gram-
matical sentences.
generative phonology n
an approach to phonology which aims to describe the knowledge (com-
petence) which a native speaker must have to be able to produce and
understand the sound system of his or her language. In generative phono-
logy, the distinctive sounds of a language (the phonemes) are shown as
groups of sound features (see distinctive features). Each sound is shown
as a different set of features. For example, the phoneme /e/ could be shown
by the features
- high
- low
+tense
Phonological rules explain how these abstract units combine and vary
when they are used in speech.
see also generative grammar, systematic phonemics
generative semanticsn
an approach to linguistic theory which grew as a reaction to Chomsky’s
syntactic-based transformational generative grammar. It considers
that all sentences are generated from a semantic structure. This semantic
structure is often expressed in the form of a proposition which is similar to
logical propositions in philosophy. Linguists working within this theory
have, for instance, suggested that there is a semantic relationship between
such sentences as
This dog strikes me as being like her master.
and
This dog reminds me of her master.
because they both have the semantic structure of
X perceives that Y is similar to Z.
see also interpretive semantics
generative theory n
a cover term for a variety of linguistic theories that have the common goals
of (a) providing an account of the formal properties of language, positing
rules that specify how to form all the grammatical sentences of a language
and no ungrammatical ones (the principle of descriptive adequacy), while
generative grammarG
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