GRAMÁTICA INGLESA II UNLP

U N I T 1
H AN D O U T # 1

DEFINING A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: GENERATIVE, FUNCTIONAL AND SEMANTIC

APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE

1. G e n er a t i ve G r a m m ar  1957 – nowadays
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By the mid-20 century, the American linguist Noam Chomsky, who had studied structural linguistics, was
seeking a way to analyse the syntax of English in a structural grammar. This effort led him to see grammar as a
theory of language structure rather than a description of actual sentences. His idea of grammar is that it is a
device for producing and understanding sentences in any and all languages. He further proposed that linguistics
should go beyond describing the structure of languages and it should provide an explanation of how sentences
in any language are interpreted and understood.
Chomsky believed that this process could be accounted for by a universal human grammar (that is, a model
or theory of linguistic knowledge or competence). Chomsky’s universalist theories are related to the ideas of
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those 18 and early 19 century grammarians who urged that grammar be considered a part of logic: the key to
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analysing thought. For instance, 19 century universal grammarians such as the British philosopher John Stuart
Mill, writing as late as 1867, believed rules of grammar to be language forms that correspond to universal thought
forms.

Knowledge of Language
With regard to the acquisition of knowledge it was widely held in previous centuries that the mind is not "so
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much to be filled therewith from without, like a vessel, as to be kindled and awaked" ; “The growth of knowledge
rather resembles the growth of fruit, however external causes may in some degree cooperate, it is the internal
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vigour and virtue of the tree that must ripen the juices to their just maturity” These statements can be taken to
mean that knowledge grows because of genetic instructions under the triggering and shaping effects of
environmental factors. Applied to language, this essentially Platonistic conception would suggest that knowledge of
a particular language grows and matures along a course that is in part intrinsically determined. These ideas
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were generally regarded with disapproval in the mainstream of linguistic research by the late 19 century and on
up to the 1950’s. In part, this negative attitude developed under the impact of empiricism and later behaviourist
and operationalist doctrines.
Before the 1960’s, the study of child language was dominated mainly by the ‘behaviourist’ approach to
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language and learning . According to this approach, language is not a mental phenomenon: it is behaviour. Like
other forms of human behaviour, it is learnt by a process of habit-formation. Language acquisition was understood,
then, as a case of overlearning; as a habit system, which was determined by available evidence. Production and
interpretation of new forms was taken to be a matter of analogy.
The main components of this habit formation process are:
1. The child imitates the sounds and patterns which he hears around him.
2. People recognise the child’s attempts as being similar to the adult models and reinforce (reward) the
sounds, by approval or some other desirable reaction.
3. In order to obtain more of these rewards, the child repeats the sounds and patterns, so that these
become habits.
4. In this way the child’s verbal behaviour is conditioned (or ‘shaped’) until the habits coincide with the
adult models.
The habit-formation process is essentially the same as when a pigeon’s behaviour is shaped, so that it pecks at
the correct discs in order to obtain food. Within this framework, the child’s own utterances were not seen as
possessing a system in their own right. They were seen as a faulty version of adult speech. The ‘mistakes’ were
simply the result of imperfect learning.
The behaviourist view of first language ‘learning’ was strongly challenged from the 1960’s onwards, especially
under the influence of Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories and cognitive psychology. These are some of the
arguments which have convinced most researchers of the inadequacies of the behaviourist approach:
 Underlying the actual behaviour that we observe (performance), there is knowledge of a complex
system of rules (competence), which enables speakers to create and understand an infinite number of

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R. Cudworth (1617-1688)
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James Harris (1709-1780)
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B.F. Skinner (1957) Verbal Behaviour
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 sentences, most of which they have never encountered before. This creativity would not be possible if
we had to rely on individual bits of learnt behaviour.
 What children acquire, then, is an abstract knowledge of rules (competence), which they are not
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exposed to, and which is often reflected very indirectly in the actual surface structure of the speech .
Information about deep relationships could not be acquired simply by observing and imitating verbal
behaviour.
 Although children are exposed to different actual speech, they arrive at the same underlying rules as
other children in their community. The evidence also suggests that they pass through similar
sequences in acquiring these rules.
 The process of language acquisition is perhaps more complex than any learning task that most
human beings undertake. Yet it occurs at a very early age and with exceptional speed. Again, this
cannot be explained by habit-formation alone.
From the point of view of Generative linguistics, then, humans do not acquire language by applying generalised
learning mechanisms with greater efficiency or scope than other organisms. There is, instead, a property of the
mind that differentiates humans from animals; a distinct language faculty with specific structure and properties.
How does Generative theory reach this conclusion? Through mere observation of the fact that, although young
children have brief, personal and limited contacts with the world which surrounds them, they have nevertheless
internalised all the basic structures of their language by the age of between three and half and five. How can they
know so much on the basis of such limited evidence? The problem that arises is one of poverty of stimulus.
Many examples have been given to illustrate the problem of poverty of evidence. A familiar example is the
structure-dependence of rules, the fact that, without instruction or direct evidence, children use computationally
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complex structure-dependent rules rather than computationally simple rules . Furthermore, children do not make
errors about the interpretation of sentences past a certain stage of development.
The difference of perception concerning the problem of language acquisition –overlearning versus poverty of
evidence– reflects very clearly the effect of the shift of focus which inaugurated the study of Generative Grammar.

Language as a system of knowledge

Cognitive systems result from the interaction of experience and the organism’s method of dealing with it (e.g.
analytic mechanisms, maturation, and cognitive growth). Although our cognitive systems reflect our experience, a
careful specification of the properties of these systems on the one hand, and of the experience that led to their
formation, on the other, shows that the two are separated by a considerable gap. In order to account for the
specificity and the richness of the cognitive systems that arise in the individual on the basis of the limited
information available, we should determine the innate endowment that serves to bridge the gap between
experience and the knowledge attained.
The study of human language is particularly interesting in this regard. In the first place, it is a true species
property and one central to human thought and understanding. Furthermore, it is possible for us to characterise
the system of knowledge attained -knowledge of English, of Spanish, etc.- and to determine the evidence that was
available to the child who gained this knowledge. We are thus in good position to ascertain the nature of the
biological endowment that constitutes the human language faculty, the innate component of the mind that yields
knowledge of language when presented with linguistic experience, that converts experience to a system of
knowledge. If we can discover something about the principles that enter into the construction of this particular
cognitive system, if we can specify the principles of the language faculty, we can progress toward a solution to the
problem of poverty of stimulus.
Generative Grammar is concerned with those aspects of form and meaning that are determined by the
language faculty, which is understood to be a particular component of the human mind. The nature of this faculty is
the subject matter of a general theory of linguistic structure that aims to discover the framework of principles and
elements common to all human languages: this theory is called UG(universal grammar). UG may be regarded as a
characterisation of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this faculty as a language
acquisition device, an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction
with presented experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of
one or another language.

How is knowledge of language acquired? The answer to this question is, as we have seen, given by a
specification of the biologically endowed language faculty of human beings, or UG, along with an account of the
ways in which the principles of UG interact with experience to yield a particular language. UG is a theory of the
initial state of the language faculty, prior to any linguistic experience.

What constitutes knowledge of language? The answer to this question is given by a generative grammar,

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For example, the surface structure of John is easy to please looks identical to that of John is eager to please, yet their deep structure is
completely different: in the first, it is a question of other people pleasing John, whereas in the second, it is John himself who wants to do the
pleasing.
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For further development of this topic, see Andrew Radford (1997). Syntactic Theory And The Structure Of English. A Minimalist
Approach.CUP. Chapter 1, section 1.6
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which is a theory concerned with the state of the mind of a person who knows a particular language. Traditional
and structuralist grammars did not deal with this question, the former because of its implicit reliance on the
unanalysed intelligence of the speaker/hearer, and the latter because of its narrowness in scope.
The concerns of traditional and generative grammar are, in a certain sense, complementary: a good
traditional or pedagogical grammar provides a full list of paradigms, examples of regular and irregular
constructions, exceptions, and observations at various levels of detail and generality about the form and meaning
of expressions, but it does not examine the question of how the speaker of a language uses such information to
attain the knowledge that is used to form and interpret new expressions, or the question of the nature and
elements of this knowledge. One could describe such a grammar as a structured and organised version of the
data presented to a child learning a language, with some general commentary and often insightful observations.
Structuralist theories did concern themselves with analytic procedures for deriving aspects of grammar from
data, as in the theories of Harris, Bloch, Trubetzkoy and others, but primarily in the areas of phonology and
morphology. The procedures suggested were inadequate and, in any event, could not provide an answer to the
question of how knowledge of language is acquired; or determine what a comprehensive account of the knowledge
of the speaker/hearer would involve.
Generative Grammar, in contrast, is concerned primarily with the knowledge of language attained by the
speaker/hearer, and the principles and procedures put to use in order to attain this knowledge.

In the mid-1950’s, a research programme was inaugurated to investigate the adequacy of certain proposals
which had been advanced in order to provide an answer to the question “What constitutes knowledge of
language?”. This program was one of the strands that led to the development of the cognitive sciences, sharing
with other approaches the belief that certain aspects of the mind can be usually construed, on the model of
computational systems, of rules that form and modify representations, and that are put to use in interpretation
and action. This research programme has since been running its course, along a number of different paths. The
study of generative grammar represented a significant shift of focus in the approach to problems of language. The
shift of focus was from behaviour or the products of behaviour to states of the mind that enter into behaviour. If one
chooses to focus attention on this latter topic, the central concern becomes knowledge of language: its nature,
origins, and use.

2. Functional Grammar 1930’s / 1970’s – nowadays6

Another form of linguistics flourished in Prague in the 1930’s. The Prague school looked outside the structure
of particular languages and attempted to explain the relation between what is spoken and the context. The Prague
school linguists stressed the function of elements within a language and emphasised that the description of a
language must include how messages are put across. In the area of phonology, their concept of distinctive
features, which divides sounds into their component articulatory and acoustic elements, has been highly regarded
and adopted by other schools of language analysis.
As from the 1970’s, various Functionalist trends have developed both in Britain and the USA. Following the
European functional tradition of the Prague school and borrowing some abstract principles from Hjelmslev and
Firth’s system-structure theory, M.A.K. Halliday put forth his Systemic Functional Linguistics in the mid-1980’s.
This model is presented as a theory of language as choice in the form of a system network. A particular language,
or any part of it, is seen as a resource for making meaning by choosing. The grammatical structures are merely the
output of this network; they just realise the sets of features that are chosen for specific communicative purposes.
The use of the term choice does not necessarily imply a conscious process of selection by the speaker. What a
functional analysis aims to uncover is the reasons why the speaker produces a particular wording rather than any
other in a particular context. Thus, Functional grammar sets out to investigate what the range of relevant choices
is, both in the kinds of meanings that can be expressed and in the kinds of wordings that can be used to express
these meanings; and to match these two sets of choices. Therefore, meaning choices are identified by: (1)
looking outwards at the context, thus determining what contextual factors make one set of meanings more
appropriate or likely to be expressed than another; (2) identifying the linguistic options (i.e. the lexical and
structural possibilities that the language system offers for use); and (3) exploring the meanings that each option
expresses. Thus, Halliday’s approach sets out to relate in a systematic way functions to wordings, that is to say,
the connection between certain meanings and certain structures, so as to reduce the analysis to a minimal number
of relevant functions.
Functions are grouped into three basic kinds of meanings or metafunctions: Experiential, Interpersonal and
Textual. The first is related to the way human beings represent the world and organise it in their minds, their
experience of the world includes description of events (and states) and of the entities involved in them. The second
refers to the manner in which human beings use language to interact and relate with each other, establishing and
maintaining relations, influencing other people’s behaviour, expressing their viewpoints and eliciting and changing
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This section is based upon Halliday, M.A.K. (1985). An Introduction to Functional Grammar.Edward Arnold / Hodder& Stoughton, London;
Thompson, G. (1996).Introducing Functional Grammar. Bristol: Arnold; and DeLancey, Scott (2001) “Lectures on Functional Syntax”. University
of Oregon, Department of Linguistics. Eugene, OR 97403-1290 – U.S.A.
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others’. The Textual Metafunction deals with the organisation of the message in ways which indicate how they fit in
with the other messages around them and with the wider context in which the communicative events take place.
Thus, Functionalism refuses to recognize strict theoretical or methodological boundaries between the syntax
and the realms of semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. According to Scott DeLancey, human language is not
simply a device for presenting and pointing to interesting objects and events in the world, it is, rather, a set of tools
for communicating our experience, and its structure is fundamentally informed by the structure of our experience
and our cultural models of experience.
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Halliday argues that the basic opposition in grammars of the second half of the 20 century is between those
that are syntagmatic in orientation (i.e. Structural and Generative “formal” grammars, with their root in logic), and
those that are primarily paradigmatic (i.e. Functional grammars, with their root in rhetoric and ethnography). The
former take regular syntactic relations as the foundation of language, having structure as the organising concept
and using special devices to relate one structure to another, whereas the latter consider that describing a language
consists in relating it to everything else, i.e. the cultural and situational contexts and communicative purposes and
choices.
Copyright © Juan Luis Stamboni, 2000 / 2004

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3. Linguistic Semantics
Semantics (from Ancient Greek: important) is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between
signifiers, like words, phrases, signs, and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotation.
Linguistic semantics is the study of meaning that is used for understanding human expression through
language. Other forms of semantics include the semantics of programming languages, formal logics, and
semiotics.
The word semantics itself denotes a range of ideas - from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in
ordinary language for denoting a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation. This
problem of understanding has been the subject of many formal enquiries, over a long period of time, most notably
in the field of formal semantics.
The formal study of semantics intersects with many other fields of inquiry, including lexicology, syntax,
pragmatics, etymology and others, although semantics is a well-defined field in its own right, often with synthetic
properties.In philosophy of language, semantics and reference are closely connected. Further related fields include
philology, communication, and semiotics. The formal study of semantics is therefore complex.
Semantics contrasts with syntax, the study of the combinatory of units of a language (without reference to their
meaning), and pragmatics, the study of the relationships between the symbols of a language, their meaning, and
the users of the language.

Basic Ideas in Semantics (from: Hurford, J.; Heasley, B.Semantics. A Coursebook.)

SEMANTICS is the study of MEANING in LANGUAGE. It is not the business of semantics to lay down
standards of semantic correctness, to prescribe what meanings words shall have, or what they maybe used for.
Semantics, like the rest of Linguistics, describes.The aim of semanticists is to explain and clarify the nature of
meaning an attempt to setup a theory of meaning.
Many basic facts about English have exact parallels in other languages. Very pervasive similarities between
languages encourage semanticists to believe that it is possible to make some very general statements about all
languages, especially about the most fundamental and central areas of meaning. The fact that it is possible to
translate any sentence of one language (at least roughly) into any other language (however clumsily) reinforces
the conclusion that the basic facts about meaning in all languages are, by and large, parallel. This is not to deny, of
course, that there are interesting differences between languages.But interesting as such differences may be as
‘collector’s items’, semantics concentrates on the similarities between languages, rather than on the differences.
Semantic theory is part of a larger enterprise, linguistic theory, which includes the study of syntax (grammar) and
phonetics (pronunciation), besides the study of meaning. It is a characteristic of Linguistics as a whole that it
concentrates on the similarities between languages.

The word “mean” can be applied to people who use language, i.e. to speakers, in roughly the sense of ‘intend’.
And it can also be applied to words and sentences in a different sense, roughly expressed as ‘be equivalent to’.
The first step in working out a theory of what meaning is is to recognize this distinction clearly and always to keep
in mind whether we are talking about what speakers mean or what words (or sentences) mean.The following two
definitions encapsulate this essential distinction:
SPEAKER MEANING is what a speaker means (i.e. intends to convey) when he uses a piece of language.
SENTENCE MEANING (or WORD MEANING) is what a sentence (or word) means, i.e. what it counts as the

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equivalent of in the language concerned.

Sentence meaning and speaker meaning are both important, but systematic study proceeds more easily if one
carefully distinguishes the two,and, for the most part, gives prior consideration to sentence meaning and those
aspects of meaning which are determined by the language system, rather than those which reflect the will of
individual speakers and the circumstances of use on particular occasions.The gap between speaker meaning and
sentence meaning is such that it is even possible for a speaker to convey a quite intelligible intention by using a
sentence whose literal meaning is contradictory or nonsensical.

There are two quite distinct ways of talking about the meaning of words and other expressions, namely SENSE
and REFERENCE.
In talking of sense, we deal with relationships inside the language.The SENSE of an expression is its place in a
system of semantic relationships with other expressions in the language (e.g. sameness).

In talking of reference, we deal with the relationships between language and the world. By means of reference, a
speaker indicates which things in the world (including persons) are being talked about.
Example: ‘My son is in the beech tree’
identifies identifies
person thing

The referent of an expression is often a thing or a person in the world; whereas the sense of an expression is not a
thing at all. In fact, it is difficult to say what sort of entity the sense of an expression is. Intuitively, it is sometimes
useful to think of sense as that part of the meaning of an expression that is left over when reference is factored
out. It is much easier to say whether or not two expressions have the same sense. (Like being able to say that two
people are in the same place without being able to say where they are.) The sense of an expression is an
abstraction, but it is helpful to note that it is an abstraction that can be entertained in the mind of a language user.

RULE: Every expression that has meaning has sense, but not every expression has reference.