Basic English Syntax with Exercises

generative grammar

1.1 Language, Grammar and Linguistic Theory

Linguistic theories are no different from any other theory in this respect. All linguists base themselves on one theory or another. One group of linguists, known as generativists, claim that in order to do things properly we need to make our theories explicit. This can be seen as a reaction to a more traditional approach to linguistics which typically claims to operate atheoretically, but, in fact, makes many implicit assumptions about language which are themselves never open to investigation or challenge. Generative linguists point out that progress is unlikely to be made like this, as if these assumptions turn out to be wrong we will never find out, as they are never questioned. In order to find out if our assumptions are correct, they need to be constantly questioned and the only way to do this is to make them explicit.

1.1 Language, Grammar and Linguistic Theory

Because of this, it is my opinion that the generative perspective is the one that is most likely to provide the best framework for a description of language. We will therefore adopt this perspective and so certain aspects of the theory will form part of the content of the book, but only in so far as they help to achieve the main goal of explaining why English is as it is. In true generative style, I will take the rest of this chapter to try to make explicit some of the basic assumptions that we will be making in the rest of the book.

1.3 A Typology of Word Categories

Having introduced some of the basic concepts, let us now turn to look at what categories we need to refer to in the description of a language like English. In generative linguistics it is often seen as a positive aim to keep basic theoretical equipment to a bare minimum and not to expand these unnecessarily. This can be seen in the standard approach to word categories in terms of the attempt to keep these to as small a number as possible. In the present book we will mainly be concerned with eight basic categories. These come in two general types: thematic categories and functional categories. In the thematic categories we have verbs (V), nouns (N), adjectives (A) and prepositions (P) and in the functional categories there are inflections (I), determiners (D), degree adverbs (Deg) and complementisers (C). Thus we have the following classification system:

1.3.4.1 Verbs

There is no traditional term specifically for predicates with sentential complements, but generative grammar has not felt the need to invent one as the subcategorisation frame serves to distinguish between the different subcategories of verbs.

2.1.1 The building blocks of sentences

This rule introduces a number of symbols to replace words used in (5). The point of this is to make properties of the rules more obvious. Recall that generative linguists insist on making their grammars explicit so that we are able to test and question the assumptions being made and it is easier to see properties of rules when stated as a formula than it is if they are given as a set of linguistic instructions, especially as the rules become more complex.

5.2.4.1 Evidence from passives

Even under a less strict view of the UTAH than we are attempting to keep to here, one would like to assume that the object is generated in the same place in active sentences and their passive counterparts. This has been the assumption since the beginning of generative grammar in the 1950s. Thus, the object is generated in object position in the passive, but moves to the subject position. Presumably the only reason it would do this is to get Case. Thus while in the active structure the object gets Case in object position, this ceases to be a Case position in the passive and hence not only does a passive verb lose its subject, it also loses the accusative Case assigned to its object. Again, these are fairly standard assumptions about the analysis of the passive which have been proposed since the 1980s.