Generative grammar

Generative grammar is a family of linguistic theories that model language with formal rules or principles capable of generating expressions. Its theories aim to characterize the structural knowledge that allows speakers to produce and understand sentences.

Phrase structure grammar: A formal grammar that represents sentences as hierarchies of constituents built by rewrite rules. Phrase-structure rules provide a direct model of how a grammar generates constituent structures.
Syntax: The system of rules and relations that organizes words into phrases and sentences. Generative grammar most often formalizes the structures and dependencies studied in syntax.
Noam Chomsky: An American linguist whose work established generative grammar as a major approach to the study of language. His early formal theories and later proposals shaped the field's central questions.
Dependency grammar: A grammatical framework that represents sentence structure through relations between words, especially heads and dependents. It organizes syntax around word-to-word dependencies rather than phrase-structure derivations.
Transformational grammar: A grammatical framework in which transformations relate or derive syntactic structures. Transformations became a central way to express relationships among sentence structures.
Grammar: The system of patterns and constraints governing the formation and interpretation of expressions in a language. Generative grammar is one theoretical approach to describing a language's grammar.
Zellig Harris: An American linguist known for structural methods and transformations that influenced early generative work. Chomsky developed transformational ideas in a tradition that included Harris's work.
Construction grammar: A family of approaches that treats learned form–meaning pairings, from words to abstract patterns, as basic grammatical units. It gives conventional constructions a central role rather than deriving them from a small set of abstract rules.
X-bar theory: A theory of phrase structure that represents phrases with a common hierarchy of head, intermediate, and maximal projections. It specifies recurring phrase structures within generative syntax.
Competence and performance: A distinction between a speaker's underlying linguistic knowledge and actual language use in particular circumstances. The distinction separates the grammatical system being modeled from errors and limits in real-time use.

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