I take heart, therefore, from a statement made by Bernard Spolsky, after a think-tank on the applications of Chomskyan grammar, held in the late sixties. If the TG representation of grammar has little or no psychological foundation, it would seem to be fairly useless for teaching purposes. 9.) Quite right: the tree diagram describes the structure “after the event”, but it ignores the fact that (as David Brazil put it) “discourse something that is now-happening, bit by bit, in time, with the language being assembled as the speaker goes along” (1995, p. Way back in 1965, he wrote: “When we say that a sentence has a certain derivation with respect to a particular generative grammar, we say nothing about how the speaker or hearer might proceed, in some practical or efficient way, to construct such a derivation.” ( Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Chomsky (to his credit) was quick to acknowledge this. For a start, the idealised nature of Chomskyan grammar seems to bear only an accidental relationship to the way language is actually stored and generated in the brain. This means cherry-picking your examples (and re-configuring your theory fairly regularly so as to accommodate new, potentially disruptive, evidence), while consigning anything that doesn’t fit to the damaged goods bin – the one labelled “performance”.īut, more importantly for me, is the lack of pedagogical applicability. The blinkered disavowal of the validity of performance data is, of course, a side-effect of their (Chomsky’s, Pinker’s etc) mentalist agenda, which is to demonstrate both the universality and innateness of their grammar. 22) Compare this to the corpus linguist, John Sinclair’s (1991) claim that “by far the majority of text is made of the occurrence of common words in common patterns”). (Chomsky’s acolyte, Stephen Pinker, woefully betrays his ignorance of developments in corpus linguistics by claiming – in The Language Instinct – that “virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe” (1994, p. Chomsky’s dogged insistence on making the “well-formed” sentence the centrepiece of his theory of language seems to undermine the whole enterprise – this, along with the misguided notion that all sentences are generated from the word up, and are hence all entirely original. By the same token, TG grammarians will reject forms as being ungrammatical even when they are commonly attested (one of the texts I consulted disallows the sentence John bought what? for example). authentic utterances like: But the spa, you might want to use it, you know – and it just doesn’t fit. Try to apply the descriptive framework to spoken data – e.g. On linguistic grounds the theory seems flawed since it is based entirely on invented sentences in their written form. In the end, all those upside-down trees leave me cross-eyed.īut there are more cogent reasons – both linguistic and pedagogical – for treating TG grammar cautiously, it seems to me. But, as much as I want to get to grips with the Minimalist program (not least because it seems to be arguing a central role for lexis in determining syntactic structure), I’m struggling. I can get my head around basic Phrase-structure grammar, even X-bar theory, and just about understand what Theta-theory is on about. Well, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure that I really understand it.
And, just in case you don’t know which one I’m talking about, it’s the one that involves the endless “tree-diagramming” of (invariably invented) sentences, like The child found a puppy and Where has Pete put his bone? (both from Fromkin et al.). Stewart and Vaillette, 2001) it’s not even called TG Grammar, nor ascribed to Chomsky by name. (2007) An Introduction to Language, or the Ohio State University Language Files (ed. In fact, in many of the standard texts, such as Fromkin et al. It is often the only theory of grammar that is studied. After all, the study of TG grammar (or any of its offshoots) is a key component of any self-respecting linguistics course on any MA TESOL program in the US. This might strike some readers as odd, even perverse. In fact, there’s no mention of Chomsky or any of his theories in the entry on Grammar at all. Nor for Government and Binding theory, nor the Principles and Parameters theory, nor the Minimalist program. Nor for its predecessor, generative grammar. There’s no entry for TG grammar in the A-Z, either. As I say, there’s no entry for X-bar theory.