Published by: panarang (Karma: 450.44) on 12 February 2018 | Views: 1758
8
One cannot help but be impressed by the scope and variety of natural sentence structures. Whereas some might have once thought that a language is learned by memorizing its sentences, it is now clear that this is not possible. All normal humans possess the ability to form entirely new sentences, sentences no one has ever heard, read, or uttered before. This, of course, is the creative aspect of language to which adherents of the generative-transformational school of linguistics have repeatedly called our attention.
The goal of this study is to describe certain subordinate structures in English and the generative mechanism, i.e. the grammar, underlying their existence. Actually, the former should follow from the latter, but since the exact nature of this generative device is not obvious, linguists have attempted to discover its properties by analyzing the structures produced by it. Unfortunately, the linguist can seldom be certain that his analysis is entirely correct. It is a common experience to find that a hypothesis which accounts nicely for a significant class of structures fails to account for others which are clearly related. Moreover, the linguist can never be certain that he has not overlooked data which would cause him to revise or reject his analysis.
One cannot help but be impressed by the scope and variety of natural sentence structures. Whereas some might have once thought that a language is learned by memorizing its sentences, it is now clear that this is not possible. All normal humans possess the ability to form entirely new sentences, sentences no one has ever heard, read, or uttered before. This, of course, is the creative aspect of language to which adherents of the generative-transformational school of linguistics have repeatedly called our attention.
The goal of this study is to describe certain subordinate structures in English and the generative mechanism, i.e. the grammar, underlying their existence. Actually, the former should follow from the latter, but since the exact nature of this generative device is not obvious, linguists have attempted to discover its properties by analyzing the structures produced by it. Unfortunately, the linguist can seldom be certain that his analysis is entirely correct. It is a common experience to find that a hypothesis which accounts nicely for a significant class of structures fails to account for others which are clearly related. Moreover, the linguist can never be certain that he has not overlooked data which would cause him to revise or reject his analysis.
