Grammatical Theory: Its Limits and Its Possibilities

by Frederick J. Newmeyer

Newmeyer persuasively defends the controversial theory of transformational generative grammar. Grammatical Theory is for every linguist, philosopher, or psychologist who is skeptical of generative grammar and wants to learn more about it.

Newmeyer's formidable scholarship raises the level of debate on transformational generative grammar. He stresses the central importance of an autonomous formal grammar, discusses the limitations of "discourse-based" approaches to syntax, cites support for generativist theory in recent research, and clarifies misunderstood concepts associated with generative grammar.

Genres: Linguistics

201 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Ushan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A defense of Chomskyan transformational generative grammar against its critics. I am not as familiar with the context of the debate as the book's intended audience, but I infer that this theory needs too many epicycles. Native speakers of English usually regard the sentence "The rat the cat the dog chased ate died" as unacceptable, and "The rat died that was eaten by the cat that the dog chased" as acceptable, even though the theory says that the two sentences have the same deep structure; the resolution is that the first sentence is grammatical but confusing. Chomskyans make a distinction between grammatical but meaningless sentences and ungrammatical non-sentences; "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is an example of the former and "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" - of the latter; when a linguist gave a list of 10 sample sentences to 10 subjects, for most sentences there was no consensus, and many answers were more complicated than "Yes"-"No"; a linguistically sophisticated subject answered that the sentence "Have you a book on modern music?" is ungrammatical in his own dialect of English but grammatical in British English. Different schools of linguistics made different judgments on whether the sentence "John didn't leave until midnight, but Bill did" is grammatical, and the data is not clear either (is this sentence grammatical?).