Natalia Fabisz – linguistics and beyond

Fig. 23 Aspects Model Grammar (Encyclopedia Britannica 1994)

The meaning of a sentence is determined form its deep structure by means of the rules of semantic component of a grammar. The phonetic form of a sentence is determined from its surface structure by means of the rules of phonological component. Thus, grammar may now be defined as a system of rules for relating pronunciation of a sentence to its meaning. The syntax, or the base, is at the core of the system and generates the infinite number of structures underlying the grammatical sentences of a language. These structures are, in turn, given a semantic and phonetic interpretation by means of the semantic and phonological component of the grammar. The phonological and semantic component are purely interpretative since they do not generate any sentences on their own but rather assign the phonetic and semantic form to the sentences generated by the syntax.

The base comprises of a set of categorial rules as well as of a lexicon. These two combined serve a function similar to that of phrase structure rules of the earlier system of TGG, with minor exceptions. The lexicon includes all the vocabulary in the language and associates with each the syntactic, semantic, and phonological information essential for the correct operation of the rules. This information is termed ‘features’. For instance, the syntactic features for ‘boy’ are: [+ Noun], [+ Count], [+ Common], [+ Animate], and [+ Human]. The categorial rules have two basic functions, namely “they define the system of grammatical relations, and they determine the ordering of elements in deep structures” (Chomsky 1965:123). The categorial rules generate phrase markers with a number of slots to be completed with lexical items. There is a set of features associated with each slot, which features determine the kind of item that can be filled in the slot. For instance, the noun ‘boy’ could be filled in a slot specified as requiring an animate noun, a common noun, a human noun, or a countable noun, however, the very noun would be excluded from slots specified as requiring an abstract noun (e.g. ‘wisdom’) or an uncountable noun (e.g. ‘sugar’). With the aid of syntactic information (features) assigned to the lexicon, the categorial rules permit sentences such as ‘The boy laughed”, while rejecting and defining as ungrammatical non-sentences such as “The boy elapsed”.

To conclude, Standard Theory modifies the original Transformational-Generative Grammar Theory in that it introduces to the system of grammar an additional semantic component represented by a deep and surface structure in a sentence. Moreover, Standard Theory makes a sharp distinction between competence and performance of an ideal speaker-hearer of a language.

Within the framework of Extended Standard Theory, a view that deep structure exists as a distinct level of syntactic structure at which lexical insertion occurs, and which serves as the input to the transformational component is maintained. Nevertheless, the rules of semantic component operate not on deep structures exclusively, as it was the case in Standard Theory, but also on surface structures of sentences.

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The Standard Theory differs from the early Transformational – Generative Grammar theory in that it introduces the distinction between competence and performance of an ideal speaker-hearer of a language as well as between deep and surface structure in a sentence.

According to Chomsky “linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance” (Chomsky 1965:3). The study of actual linguistic performance should account for a number of factors, the underlying competence of the speaker-hearer in particular. Thus, competence can be defined as the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language which allows him to construct and understand indefinitely many grammatical sentences. Performance, on the other hand, can be defined as the actual use of language in concrete situations and is concerned with acceptability rather than grammaticality. It should also be borne in mind that errors occurring in linguistic performance are irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence since performance does not directly mirror competence. The goal and challenge at the same time for a linguist and for a child learning a language is to figure the underlying system of rules of the speaker-hearer on the basis of his performance. Thus, a grammar of a language may be said to aim at a syntactic description of the ideal speaker-hearer’s intrinsic competence, and if this grammar is explicit enough, it may be termed a generative grammar. Hence, generative grammar is there to describe the knowledge of the language of a speaker-hearer, which knowledge he utilizes in actual language use.

Generative grammar is a system of rules which generate an indefinitely large number of structures. These rules may be analyzed within three components of generative grammar, namely syntactic component, phonological component, and semantic component. The syntactic component comprises of rules which generate sentences and assign to them two structural analyses, a deep structure and a surface structure. Deep structure is represented by the underlying phrase marker, which is assigned by rules of the base (an equivalent of phrase structure rules of the early model of TGG), whereas surface structure is represented by the final derived phrase marker, which is assigned by the transformational rules. Figure 23 below presents how the four sets of rules interrelate.



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