EXAMIME THE ESSENCE AND THRUST OF THE GENERATIVE

GRAMMER
The generative grammar is an improvement of the structural grammar that
focused on the analysis of constituents of construction. Nwala (2015 p. 126)
opined that: ICG is not an explicit grammatical analysis. It does not for example
explain the history of derivations; the lexical and phrasal categories of items and
common relationships that exist among constructions are not defined.
From the position of Nwala above, we observed some shortcomings in ICG and
that the generative grammar improved on the shortcomings; because it tries to
answer several questions left unanswered by the structuralist corroborating Nwala
observations of ICG shortcomings, Jindal (2013) states that “structuralism as has
is primarily corpus bound, that is, it analyzes the data of a given corpus by
inductive methods”.
Improving on this, Chomskey, attempts to explain how the competence of a
native speaker of a language can enable the speaker to produce an indefinite
number of sentences are not only generated grammatical but meaningful. This is
possible because Chomskey, through the generative grammar considers the
relations between form and meaning as crucial in the generation of sentences that
are both grammatical and meaningful. In proving that a sentence can be
grammatical correct sentence can be grammatically correct yet not meaningful,
Chomskey gives example of a sentence “colorless green ideas sleeps furiously”.
Generative grammar does not generate sentences like these rather generate
sentences that are both grammatical and meaningful.
Generative grammar is a mentalistic form of grammar which sees the human mind
as the faculty of language. This means that every normal native speaker possesses
an innate capacity of language that allows him in the production and
understanding not only those sentences he has heard before but also produces an
indefinitely large numbers of new sentences he has not heard from the native
speakers.
According to Anyanwu (2002): Everyone accepts that no human being ever born
speaking a language. That is to say that language is not inherited. However, every
normal human being is born with the capacity to master the language spoken in
his immediate environment.
From Anyanwu position, it could be said, that generative grammar through the
process of re-write rules and the use of transformations helps a child to produce
indefinite numbers of potentially grammatical sentences in a language of his
immediate environment. This leads to the process of language mastery in which
there is no conscious efforts, the type usually experienced in the mastery of a
foreign language when we are grown and have language already.
Generative grammar enables the speaker of a language to have knowledge of rules
that describe the combination of words and phrases. The adherence of these rules
makes the speaker to be competent in speaking his language. According to Nwala
(2015), these rules “describes process of generating sentences, structural
relationship and phrasal categories of items in a construction among other
things”.
From the above assertion, we can say that generative grammar exposes speakers
of a language to rules that are abstract and are part of the knowledge acquired
naturally by a native speaker. The native speaker simply apply these rules to
derive grammatical and acceptable sentences when properly applied but when not
properly applied it leads to ungrammatical and unacceptable sentences. For
instance, in the sentence like:
John injured herself
S C
The syntactic formation of the above sentence is in order as such is grammatically
correct because the rule of grammar was observed. The sentence structure is
subject, verb, complement, which portrays the sentence as a simple sentence. In
the other hand, the sentence is not acceptable because meaning is impaired;
“herself”, being an anaphor is supposed to agree with the gender of its antecedent
“John”.
Generative grammar is a sub-conscious grammar which means that, it cannot be
behind and the native speaker does not know the much he knows about these rules
of grammar even though he uses them. Anyanwu (2002) states that: Many
scholars here wondered at the child’s ability to grapple with such mass of
language data as any human language is filled with. The child is able to process
most language tasks and data (in phonology, vocabulary, structure and meaning)
simultaneously without the help of any formalized instructions.
This means that generative grammar helps in the production of indefinite number
of sentences, indefinite number of vocabularies and the ability of the antive
speaker in structuring of sentences.
Generative grammar is a kind of fomalization of the immediate constituent
grammar because it tries to vividly explain the inadequacies of the immediate
constituent grammar (ICG). Nwala (2015) in justification of Chomkey’s criticism
of ICG on the ground of its inadequacy opined that: The analysis of constituent
of construction which the structural grammarians pursued through the process of
decomposition and segmentation of the immediate constituents, left a lot
unexplained. ICG is not explicit grammatical analysis.
The observed shortcomings by Chomskey led to the introduction of generative
grammar. Unlike the ICG, generative grammar is a model of an explicit
specification of sentences and their structures though re-write rules. The re-write
rules of the generative grammar describes the mental or innate knowledge of a
native speaker which he uses in language making and speech realization. It should
be noted that the knowledge of a language is knowledge of the rules that describe
knowledge of the rules that describe the combination of words and phrases. In
conclusion therefore, it is right to say that, generative grammar (GG) is very
important because it concerns with competent of a native speaker in the use of his
language.