Generative Grammar

Abstract

Abstract This entry offers an introduction to generative grammar, describing the key components of the framework and its historical development since its start in the 1950s. Generative grammar is concerned with language as a mental object, and it studies speakers' internal faculty of language: the ability to produce and understand an infinite number of linguistic expressions from a finite set of linguistic building blocks. At the core of this is the syntactic/computational component that puts together linguistic items via the operation Merge and produces hierarchical structures. The syntactic/computational component communicates with the two interpretive components that map the syntactic structures to the articulatory system and the system of thought/interpretation.