Long answer:

Yet, there are two important aspects of a generative grammar both lacking, in some degree, in the previous traditional and structuralist grammars. First, a generative grammar is not concerned with any actual set of sentences of the language but with the possible set of sentences, since we can produce sentences ad infinitum indefinitely. We must remember, however, that to say that the number of sentences may be infinite does not mean that the grammar itself is infinite.

On the contrary, grammar has a finite number of rules just as a finite set of figures from 0 to 9 allows us to generate an infinite set of numbers.

TGLA Ch 2 Traditional Grammar from a Modern Perspective

Secondly, to say that grammar is generative is to say that it is explicit , that is, it explicitly indicates what are the possible sentences of the language. This, too, is a reaction to previous approaches since a grammar that looks for patterns in a body of texts could fail to be explicit even if it allowed for considerable extrapolation. Thus, in the Latin grammar traditional grammar , the conjugations of the verbs and the declensions of the nouns are set out in long paradigms i.

There are two other important points that are related to the whole question of generation. First, the structuralists were largely concerned with the problem of how to discover the phonemes, morphemes, etc. It is important to note that competence is viewed not as a skill but as a system of knowledge which underlies various skills. According to the theory, the native speaker of a language would have internalized a set of rules which forms the basis of his ability to speak and to understand his language. Yet, if we investigate what he says, this would be part of his performance.

Chomsky proposed, then, that the phrase structure rules and lexicon would generate the deep structures of sentences meaning and that the rules of the transformational component of the syntax would place them into surface structures phonology. This woud allow students to generate an unlimited number of new phrases in a language, provided that the necessary vocabulary was known. The professor was A. Noam Chomsky, and his book, a page monograph entitled Syntactic Structures , was soon to have a profound effect on language studies 4 since it was the first grammar to force psychologists to reconsider their whole approach to the study of language behaviour, and so heralded the psycholinguistic revolution.

This volume was a criticism to the structuralist approach to language study, as Chomsky considered the entire structuralist theory to have been built upon wrong assumptions on their methods. He felt their research should concern the logic of language regularities. In fact, Harris and his student Noam Chomsky worked together to develop a phrase-structure grammar which, although modeled along the rigorous structuralist lines, took some scholarly traditional notions.

In his first work , he examined a number of generative grammars to demonstrate that no particular grammar thus far formulated meets his standards of adequacy. Then, he presented a new formulation, phrase structure rules plus transformational rules, which he believed to be more accurate and more useful.

Thus, he took from traditional grammarians the terminology like subject, object, complement, singular and plural. From structuralists, he took the notions of phoneme, morpheme, and so on, and his two major contributions were these: 1 he introduced a precise, mathematical method of writing grammar rules; 2 he added a third level, the tranformation level to grammar theory.

Hence, his model generative grammar proposed a three-level, rule -based system: phonemic, morphemic, and phrase-structure rules. After a slow start, transformational-generative grammar finally took hold. Chomsky and others worked at extending and refining the early theoretical model, since Chomsky admitted that there were certain defects in his early model. Eventually, they arrived at enough modifications and revisions on the original theory, and soon new inquiries showed that the linguist must rely on the linguistic intuitions of native speakers LaPalombara, , and therefore, cognitive theories on learning and language acquisition.

It is because human infants enjoy the benefit of this language-acquisition faculty that they are able to acquire a highly complex system of knowledge long before they have reached intellectual maturity and on the basis of exposure to primary data that is both limited in quantity and often degenerate in quality. Chomsky, then, claimed that native speakers have knowledge of grammatical principles that simply could not have been learned by each and every native speaker on the basis of generalisation from samples of primary data.

Structuralist claimed that language learning takes place by the processes of observation, imitation, and cultural reinforcement. Chomsky, however, although he admitted the importance of such environmental influence, said that exposure alone was simply not enough to explain language acquisition processes.

Chomsky went further by saying that there exist in the mind innate structures which determine, in advance of its acquisition, certain of the specific forms of the acquired knowledge. In other words, a child must possess some kind of inherent linguistic theory that generally limits and specifies the possible form of any human language. In the decade from to the foundations of generative grammar were laid and a complex technical formalism was developed. Here, the syntactic component generates an infinite set of structures which are then related by the semantic and phonological components to meaning and sound.

Comparing Traditional and Structural Grammar

Notice first of all that the rules of the semantic and phonological components are taken to be interpretative of syntactic structures, and that the rules of syntax are at the heart of the system phrase-structure rules, transformational rules and lexicon. As stated before, Chomsky proposed, then, that the phrase structure rules and lexicon would generate the deep structures of sentences meaning and that the rules of the transformational component of the syntax would place them into surface structures phonology.


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The deep structure semantics approach may seem attractive, but if faces most of the criticisms of traditional notional grammar. Deep grammar, in fact, is to give a name to semantics. So, Chomsky conceived finally a revised model with a base component called, for the first time, the dee p structure , whose base component would include syntactical rules, semantic and phonological information represented by feature matrixes of lexical items, and phrase markers.

All sentences would then be generated directly from the deep structure, or base, by means of various transformation operations, to become actual sentences or surface structures LaPalombara, By the time he wrote Aspects of the Theory of Syntax some ten years later, he had come to regard linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology. To be sure, he still thought a grammar theory should contain a syntax as the principal mediating component, but he was no longer willing to ignore the influence of semantics. Transformational-Generative Grammar was a response to behaviouristic approaches to language acquisition processes.

Regarding the teaching of languages, the psychological approach is related to questions such as when and how children develop their ability to ask questions syntactically, or when they learn the inflectional systems of their language. Another interdisciplinary overlap, as Crystal states is psycholinguistics. It is a distinct area of interest developed in the early sixties and in its early form covered from acoustic phonetics to language pathology.

Most of its researchers have been influenced by the development of generative theory where the most important area is the investigation of the acquisition of language by children. Linguists such as R. Therefore, we shall review the behaviorist approach since cognitive approaches are considered a rejection to them.

Also, we shall state the basis for naturalistic approaches which explain children language acquisition processes as an introduction to next section on communicative grammar. Before the s, views of how language was acquired started to change. In the behaviorist theory of stimulus -response learning, particularly the operant conditioning model of Skinner, all learning is regarded as the establishment of habits as the result of reinforcement or reward.

According to this theory, infants acquire their native-language habits through different stages i. As they acquire more of the syntactic and morphological variations of the language, they create new combinations by generalization or analogy, sometimes making mistakes Rivers, However, the behaviorist view of native -language learning was rejected by a number of theorist, notably Chomsky and Lenneberg.

They maintained that certain aspects of native-language learning made it impossible to accept the habit-formation-by-reinforcement theory. Lenneberg and Chomsky maintained that man has certain innate propensities for acquiring a language, and for acquiring a language with a complicated grammar by some process of imitation and generalization. Consequently, children identify the basic syntactic system of the language to which they are attending, and mastery of the language from identification and not from repetition and reinforcement.

This theory of language learning, then, was approached from a psycholinguistic and cognitive view to learning processes, such as habit formation, induction, inferencing, hypothesis testing, and generalization. His approach provides a humanistic view of teaching where priority is given to interactive processes of communication. He maintained that human beings come into the world with innate langauge- learning abilities in the form of a langauge acquisition device which proceeds by hypothesis testing, that is, children make hypotheses and compare these with their innate knowledge of possible grammars based on the principles of universal grammar.

Language use, then, is rule -governed behaviour which enables speakers to create new utterances which conform to the rules they have internalized. Yet, in the development of generative theory, the most important area is the investigation of the acquisition of language by children, and most researchers were influenced by this view. Hence, the most prominent figures in this field are, among others, Stephen Krashen, and Tracy D. An approach to language teaching that constantly recurs through the centuries is the attempt to achieve a language-learning situation which resembles as closely as possible the way children learn their first language.

Basically the natural approach involves setting up informal situations where students communicate with each other and their teacher and, through communicating, acquire the new language. This is an active, inductive approach. Hence, Stephen D. Krashen developed a second language acquisition research as a source for learning theories. He distinguishes two concepts here, acquisition and learning, where acquisition is seen as the basic process involved in developing language proficiency. For him, it is the unconscious development of the target language system as a result of using the language for real communication.

Learning would be related to the conscious representation of grammatical knowledge and non spontaneous processes. He developed the Monitor Model on which the Natural method was built. Another theorist, Tracy D.

Hypothesis and Theory ARTICLE

Terrell is closely related to Krashen, since they both wrote a book named The Natural Approach , and their theories emphasize the nature of the human and physical context in which language learning takes place. Their learning theory is supported by three main principles. The period from the s through the s witnessed a major paradigm shift in language teaching. The quest for alternatives to grammar-based approaches and methods led in several different directions, and therefore, different classroom methods.

Whereas Audiolingualism and Situational Language Teaching were mainstream methods developed by linguists and applied linguists, the methods described in this section were either developed outside of mainstream language teaching or represent an application in language teaching of educational principles developed elsewhere. A different case is represented by the Natural Method that, although proposed in the s, emerged within mainstream education in the nineteenth century and have been later applied and extended to second and foreign language teaching, with some changes on terminology.

Let us examine all this methods starting by the Natural Method. Even the, he advocated systematic study to offset the problems of what one has misheard or confused.


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    • They have found that formal instruction plays an important role in language proficiency. Krashen proposed that the first learned informally in context would be termed acquisition whereas the second learned through systematic study would be termed learning. He believed acquisition takes place when linguistic abilities are internalized naturally in informal situations, and that language learning, on the other hand, is a conscious process taken out of a language learning situation or a self study program.

    The present approach to language learning, then, is to be set in the language laboratory, where students study the language systematically on their own and class sessions are devoted entirely to natural interaction, providing opportunities to create new utterances. Thus, the Monitor Model consists of five central hypotheses: 1 the acquisition vs learning hypothesis, already discussed; 2 the natural order hypothesis, whereby students are said to follow a more or less invariant order in the acquisition process; 3 the Monit or hypothesis, whereby the monitor is the device learners use for their language performance; 4 the input hypothesis, whereby acquisition takes place as a result of the learner having understood input that is a little beyond the current level of his competence; and 5 the affective filter hypothesis, whereby the filter controls how much input the learner comes into contact with, and how much input is converted into intake Ellis, Tota l Physical Response centers on both processes and conditions aspects of learning.

    Thus, coordinating language production with body movement and physical actions is believed to provide the conditions for success in language learning. Total Physical Response is linked to several traditions, such as psychology, learning theory, and humanistic pedagogy. This method is built around the combination of speech and action and was developed by James Asher, a professor of psychology. For him, including movements within the linguistic production reduces learner stress, creating a positive mood which facilitates learning.