"generative"

[Adam Przepiorkowski]

You can give the term "generative" any denotation you want ("`When I use a
word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I
choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'"), but why not use the
definitions provided by authoritative sources like... Chomsky:

  If the grammar is ... perfectly explicit ... we may ... call it a
  generative grammar.
    (Chomsky 1965, "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax")

  I have always understood a generative grammar to be nothing more
  than an explicit grammar.
    (Chomsky 1995, "The Minimalist Program")

... or linguistic dictionaries:

  GENERATIVE GRAMMAR n. 1. A grammar for a particular language which at
  least enumerates and usually also characterizes (assigns structures to)
  all and only the well-formed sentences of that language ...  Such a
  grammar differs from other approaches to grammatical description in that
  it is fully explicit, leaving nothing to be filled in by a human reader.
  The notion of a generative grammar in this sense was introduced by
  Chomsky (1957)... 2. Any particular theory of grammar which has as its
  goal the construction of such grammars for particular languages.  3. The
  enterprise of constructing such theories of grammar...
    (Trask 1993, "A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics",
     Routledge)

  GENERATIVE GRAMMAR is a set of formal rules which projects a finite set
  of sentences upon the potentially infinite set of sentences that
  constitute the language as a whole, and it does this in an explicit
  manner, assigning to each a set of structural descriptions In recent
  years, the term has come to be applied to theories of several different
  kinds, apart from those developed by Chomsky, such as Arc-Pair Grammar,
  Lexical Functional Grammar and Generalized Phrase-Structure Grammar...
    (Crystal 1997, "A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics", Blackwell)

There is also a lucid (IMHO) discussion of the term in Bob Borsley's 2000
paper "What is Generative Grammar?".

Of course, the question remains which frameworks are "generative" according
to these definitions.

Best,
	
	Adam


P.S. Please, no flames for using the word "authoritative" rather than
     "authoritarian" above...

--
           ,
ADAM PRZEPIORKOWSKI
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