Talk:Generative grammar

Balance?

• Seems to me that this page needs some work to make it more balanced. It seems to give little or no indication that there have ever been legitimate challenges to Chomskyan generative grammar. And although it's nice that it mentions other generative frameworks, it proceeds to provide an article about only one. At least LFG etc. should be included in the history section. On the other hand, if it is considered appropriate to only provide links to articles on LFG, etc, then this should be made a disambiguation page and almost all content here should become a page with a more specific title. Also, it seems to me very difficult to evaluate or even grasp Chomskyan generative grammar (at least) without a fairly thorough treatment of its fundamental assumptions and arguments (POS, etc.) along with, whenever possible, links to alternative arguments or approaches. I would try to do some of this myself but I'm pretty certain there are people here much better qualified than I. PS: I don't hate generative grammar. :) Ailun (talk) 16:36, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

  I agree. The article starts with innateness claims. Most non-Chomskyan frameworks do not assume this anymore. A generative grammar in one definition of this term is a grammar generating a set. This is quite formal and applies to many grammars. Pullum & Scholz call this generative-enumerative. No innatenes-claims implied. HPSG and LFG and even some variants of CxG consider themselves generative grammars but in the sense of Chomsky 1965: A grammar of a language purports to be a description of the ideal speaker-hearer's intrinsic competence. If the grammar is, furthermore, perfectly explicit - in other words, if it does not rely on the intelligence of the understanding reader but rather provides an explicit analysis of his contribution - we may call it (somewhat redundantly) a generative grammar.

  One could say that many researchers equate the term with Chomskyan mainstream linguistics. This is connected with innateness. StefanMülller (talk) 08:06, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

Neutrality

I understand that this theory is mostly obsolete and is not accepted/ proved by linguists in general anymore, but the language of the page is highly negative (with uses of words such as "so-called", for example). This feels unnecessary and the comment of Chomsky saying that "it's only a theory that will be understood later on" feels more like a personal opinion rather than anything that is pertinent to the theory itself. 267 17:06, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

Agreed. For example, the neuroscience stuff from 1993 citing Kluender & Kutas seems trivial and makes it seem like the editor was trying to pile up criticisms. Overall a pretty poor article as it stands. D emcee (talk) 07:50, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

This theory is not "mostly obsolete." It's obviously controversial, which is how you get people saying it's obsolete, but it's still very popular in the United States, though less so in Europe. This really just adds onto your point, the "so-calleds" are strange. ZeldaGaladriel (talk) 04:05, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I removed them all. I think it is better now. Femke 01 (talk) 07:59, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Remove/Improve footnote 16 about refutation of theory

There should be plenty of criticism cited here. The paper cited at the end of the opening section, Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language, is not representative of it, nor does it hold up to any scrutiny. It's not published anywhere and clearly motivated by some extra-scholastic factors.

To serve the topic the link tries to provide: I would suggest there can even be a section disambiguating the goals and results of LLMs vs. the goals and results of human language theory. But the current article cited doesn't even address the same question the theory is attempting to: Chomsky's theory tries to answer how do humans arrive at their grammar that produces language, whereas this paper is focused on how a different computational process simulated human language - the result, not the how. 100.2.102.27 (talk) 23:29, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 15 January 2025 and 9 May 2025. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Mayabrown27 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Mayabrown27 (talk) 04:10, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

Jespersen

No mention of Otto Jespersen ? Stjohn1970 (talk) 02:05, 9 March 2026 (UTC)