#generativism

I used to think structures like this existed only in the wildest fantasies of generativists. And yet, here is a real-life example of triple center embedding from Plato’s prose:

We know that human beings evolved from ancestors without language. This means our language faculty must have evolved and it must therefore be capable of evolving. The innate grammar module the generativists propose is not "evolvable" and poses other problems besides, and cannot therefore be part of our language faculty. On the other hand, there probably are language instincts linked to babbling, selective hearing and the learning of words. Language is also based on a range of social instincts, but these are not language-specific.

~ Sverker Johansson, The dawn of language, p. 197

Want to hear all the drama in linguistics? Check out “The linguistics wars”, which documents one of the most vicious intellectual battles between what have become the two dominant camps in linguistics today—generativism and functionalism.

9/15/16

Thing-A-Day #867 - Generativists

In broadest terms, generative linguistics is one way to study and model language structure. It is therefore a part of the broader structuralist program (see for instance F Newmeyer).

In particular, generativism shares these structuralist commitments:

Language as an interconnected hierarchical semiotic system

Distinction between competence and performance (languge/parole)

Meaning and function expressed through distinctive features

Language susceptible to syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis

Specific concepts such as phoneme, morpheme, lexeme

Language units as symbolic pairings of meaning and form

Linearity of language

Etc.

While many of the generativist approaches grew out of a critique of the structuralist orthodoxy of the time, they still stayed firmly within the broader structuralist framework. In some way, generative linguistics could be seen as a contribution to a structuralist theory of syntax.