Generative Grammar

[Farghaly01 at aol.com]

1. What the term "generative" means!

I do not think the term "generative grammar" has anything to do with
generation as we understand it in natural language processing, e.g., text
generation as opposed to text analysis. It does not mean production because
generative grammar has been described since the 1960s as the grammar that
represents the knowledge speakers of a language have. This knowledge is
responsible for the production as well as the understanding of speech. So it
is neutral between production and understanding. We may use the same grammar
for production and analysis.

2.  Mathematical properties of generative grammar

Although a generative grammar defines the infinite set of sentences in a
language, and therefore must have important mathematical properties like
recursion, enumerability ..., etc., this cannot be its defining property
since this mathematical property is shared, as has correctly been said, with
formal language theory which is often used for the description of
"non-natural languages." If we take generative grammar to mean the
representation of the human mental knowledge speakers have of their language,
then HPSG and LFG, along with Chomskyan grammar, are definitely generative.

Ali Farghaly
Eastern Michigan University