Generative Grammar - Grammaticality Judgments

Grammaticality Judgments

When generative grammar was first proposed, it was widely hailed as a way of formalizing the implicit set of rules a person "knows" when they know their native language and produce grammatical utterances in it (grammaticality intuitions). However Chomsky has repeatedly rejected that interpretation; according to him, the grammar of a language is a statement of what it is that a person has to know in order to recognize an utterance as grammatical, but not a hypothesis about the processes involved in either understanding or producing language.

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Famous quotes containing the word judgments:

    We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.
    Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)