DEPARTMENT

OF ENGLISH
FACULTY OF LETTERS AND HUMAN SCIENCES,
MOHAMED V UNIVERSITY
RABAT.

COURSE: SYNTAX

PROF. SOUALI



Major claims, concepts and goals of Generative Grammar
(The Principles and Parameters framework).


Today's written lecture is concerned with Generative
Grammar (The theory of language developed by Noam
Chomsky and his associates since the fifties of the twentieth
century), more specifically its version known as the Principles
and Parameters framework (developed in the eighties of the
last centuries and presented in many references, including
course books by Andrew Radford, Andrew Carnie, Liliane
Haegemane, Jamal Ouhalla, ..), and which represents the
theoretical framework for this Syntax course.

As I have already mentioned to you, given the fact that the
limited time we have this semester may be enough just to
cover in detail the technical issues of English syntax, I will
present the major claims, concepts and goals of our
theoretical framework in a brief manner. You are therefore
required to read and summarize the basic references about
this introductory topic (at least the first chapter of Radford's
book and that of Andrew Carnie's). To make sure that you
have worked on this topic properly, I will include at least one
question about it in the final exam.

 Among the key issues and concepts of Generative
Grammar you should deal with in more detail, I can mention
the following:

a. Grammatical competence (or I(nternal)-language),
which is the abstract and unconscious system of
linguistic knowledge that develops within human
beings as they acquire their mother tongue/native
language. In other words, it refers to the mentally
represented grammar of our mother tongue, which
develops within us over a relatively short period of
time, and which allows us, as native speakers, to
produce and understand an infinite number of
sentences and to distinguish between
grammatical/well-formed sentences and
ungrammatical/ill-formed ones, including sentences we
have never produced or heard before. Grammatical
competence is opposed, according to Chomsky, to
performance or what he has been referring to recently
as E(external) language. For a detailed distinction
between I-language and E-language see the references
stated in the course description.

b. Universal Grammar/the language faculty, which refers
to the universal system of linguistic knowledge that is
born with us, i.e. the linguistic system of knowledge
that all ordinary humans possess before they are
exposed to their linguistic environment. According to
Chomsky, who has developed this mentalist approach
to language, universal grammar or the human language
faculty consists essentially of universal principles of
language, a claim which has its origins in the
seventeenth century (with René Descartes, Port Royal
Grammarians, ...). It is worth pointing out that Chomsky
 has recently distinguished between two types of human
language faculty, namely what he refers to as Language
Faculty Narrow and what he call Language Faculty
Broad. The former consists of Narrow (or pure) Syntax,
not involving sound and meaning, while the latter
consists of both narrow syntax/Narrow language
faculty and the levels of sound and meaning.
Universal grammar essentially consists of universal
aspects of human language, including universal
linguistic principles, i.e., linguistic principles that
govern the structure of all human languages (e.g. X-bar
principles (to be presented late in this course, the
headedness principle, which requires all phrasal and
clausal constituents to have one and only one head, and
the binarity principle, which requires all syntactic
structure not to involve more than two branches
(binary branching), etc.)


c. Parameters and parameter setting

Another issue you should deal with is that of
parameters and parameter setting. Parameters are the
syntactic choices associated with universal grammar
and its principles, and which account for the observed
cross-linguistic variation concerning a major aspect of
the syntactic level. In the Principles-and-Parameters
framework, it is generally claimed that all parameters
have binary (+/-) values, which need to be set by
children while they are acquiring their mother tongue,
based on very limited linguistic evidence. Among the
well-known examples, we have the so-called head-
complement parameter, which concerns the syntactic
order between an its complement. The setting of this
 parameter gives us either a head-first language (e.g.
English, French and Arabic), where a head (V, N, Adj, P,
..) consistently precedes its complement, or a head final
language (e,g., Dutch, German, and Turkish), where the
head consistently follows its complement. Another
well-known example is the Null Subject (or PRO-drop)
parameter, which accounts for major language types,
namely those where the subject of a
main/root/independent clause may be phoneticaly
unrealized (e.g. Arabic, Spanish and Italian) and
languages where this is not possible (e.g. English and
French)


d. Goals of linguistic theory (according to Noam Chomsky)

In this general theoretical background, you should also
read and summarize few references about Chomsky
considers to be the most important goals of linguistic
theory (including syntactic theory), bearing in mind
that for him the main object of study of modern
linguistics (more specifically his Generativist school) is
what he calls "knowledge of language", i,e., the system
of knowledge that develops within us as we acquire our
native language, as pointed out above. For Chomsky all
the major goals of Linguistics should be concerned with
this object of study. These goals are the following:


1. To develop an account (or theory) of knowledge of
language (i.e. human language structure), answering
the question concerning what it is that we know
when we say that we know our native language.

 2. To develop an account (or theory) of language
acquisition.
For rationalists/mentalists like Chomsky, humans
acquire their first language largely thanks to an
inborn/genetically determined language faculty
(which is the most important) in interaction with our
limited linguistic environment. Among Chomsky's
key arguments supporting this mentalist view of
language acquisition, we can mention the so-called
Poverty of Stimulus argument, which is the
observation that much of our knowledge of language
(especially at the syntactic level) is not directly
accessible in our linguistic environment, including
phonologically null constituents, hierarchical
structure, movement operations, universal linguistic
principles and constraints, etc. Other arguments
include the universal aspects of human language, the
impressive speed of first language acquisition and its
uniformity across languages, and last but not least,
the creativity/productivity of human language and
language use.


3. To develop an account (or theory) of language use,
allowing us to understand how native speakers put
their unconscious and perfect knowledge of language
(i.e. their grammatical competence or I-language)
into use in real situations and showing us how
different extra-linguistic factors determine this
language use, be they psychological, biological, social,
cultural, etc. These theories/accounts of language use
are also referred to as performance theories,
developed in such fields as Psycholinguistics,
pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, etc.,
 as opposed to competence theories, which are
developed within Core Linguistics (Syntax,
Morphology, Phonology and Semantics).

4. To develop an account of how knowledge of language
is represented in the human brain, a goal which falls
within the domain of Neurolinguistics and
Neuropsychology.

5. And finally to develop an account of the origin and
evolution of the human language faculty, i.e. when
and how human beings developed their genetically
determined ability to acquire human language. This
has recently become a very promising domain of
research, especially withing an emerging subfield of
modern linguistics, namely Biolinguistics (there are
many references on it available in the internet, e.r the
articles written by Chomsky, Hausser and Fitch and
those written by Ray Jackendoff). You may read just
one article on this to have a basic view of this goal of
linguistics and the main questions it deals with).