GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

Chomskys discussion is more focused on linguistics competence, the knowledge of

language possessed by the speaker and the hearer in their native language. Chomsky has claimed
that the linguistic competence comes from the innate knowledge that human genetically endowed
with. The innate knowledge is in human brain or, as Chomsky (2002:1) calls it, in language
faculty. As an evidence, he argues in what he calls as the poverty of stimulus that children
acquire their linguistics competence mostly by their own capabilities with less sufficient
information and experience, for example, we often witness a two years old child can state what
s/he thinks or wants almost perfectly in his/her native language without any instruction from
his/her parents. Chomsky uses the term of Universal Grammar to this point.
Generative grammar is a generalization of system of rules applied in all languages, as
Chomsky states as follows
a generative grammar is a system of many hundreds of rules of several different
types, organized in accordance with certain fixed principles of ordering and
applicability and containing a certain fixed substructure which, along with the
general principles of organization, is common to all languages. (Chomsky, 2005:
p.77)
In generative grammar, Chomsky discusses about grammatical transformations or
tranformational-generative grammar. It is an approach in syntactic analysis which observes
languages and theories about the general principles in producing language. The rules express the
relation of deep and surface structure. As Chomsky states,
The central idea of transformational grammar is that they are, in general,
distinct and that the surface structure is determined by repeated application of
certain formal operations called "grammatical transformations" to objects of a
more elementary sort. If this is true (as I assume, henceforth), then the syntactic
component must generate deep and surface structures, for each sentence, and must
interrelate them. (Chomsky, 1963: p.17)
Chomsky explains, deep structure refers to a representation of the phrases that play a
more central role in the semantic interpretation of a sentence (2005: p.93). In other words, deep
structure is the basic structure of sentences. Whereas, for surface structure, he explains it as a
representation of the phrases that constitute a linguistic expression and the categories to which

these phrases belong (2005: p.92) or the structure of sentence which is different from the basic
one after being applied of transformational rules. Transformational rules includes moving,
adding, or deleting elements (Fromkin, 2003: p.117). The sentence as follows will illustrate,
The cake is eaten by my brother
In the case of the cited example above, there are some informations contained in the
sentence: it must indicate that (1) there is an activity, namely eating; (2) the activity is done by a
doer, which in the case above is my brother and (3) there is the one that being eaten by the
doer, which in the case above is the cake. Therefore, as the English basic structure of sentence
(a doer doing an activity a thing receiving the activity), the semantic interpretation of the
sentence or the deep structure of the sentence is my brother eats the cake. The sentence above
has received transformational rules namely movement (my brother as the doer is moved to the
back of the sentence, while the cake as the receiver is moved to the front) and additional
element (by to signify the doer).