Talk:Generative linguistics

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Interesting that you used the word nativism.

Chomsky's approach is characterised by... the assertion of a strong linguistic nativism (and therefore an assertion that some set of fundamental characteristics of all human languages must be the same).

[edit] Unreferenced

Apparently the information on this page is controversial (considering I used this concept of generative linguistics in a paper and my professor disagrees, and wants to see it from a more authorative source than Wikipedia). Of course, I shouldn't have cited Wikipedia in this case, because I can't follow through and check the article's references: there aren't any. Does anyone know of good references that back this up? rspeer 19:32, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

I'll try and add the needed citations here but any introductory linguistics textbook should provide you with what you need. Despite the fact that generative grammar and generative linquistics have fallen out favor amongst academics, the basic history and theory behind it is still included in most college texts. Try looking at the latest edition of Fromkin & Rodman. Lisapollison 03:07, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Er, it depends what part of the world you're in. Generative linguistics is pretty mainstream in the linguistics departments of North America and the UK.Jsteph 09:03, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Agreed... Almost any work in linguistics is nowadays done in the generative framework in North America. Lingforum 01:24, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge?

Two articles about the same thing. Merge --Kerowyn 00:37, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

they are not exactly the same. For those who do not know that generative linguistics stems from generative grammar, the fact that they are separate is very useful.

they are fundamentally different concepts. generative linguistics can refer to either chomsky's generative grammar or lakoff and co.'s generative semantics. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.65.79.123 (talk) 17:14, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Linguistics vs Grammar

I'm not sure merger is appropriate (although this article needs a lot of cleaning up). Generative Linguistics includes a variety of subdisciplines including Generative grammar, Generative phonology, optimatity theory, generative morphology, distributed morphology etc. Generative grammar is normally restricted to the syntactic side of things (but also includes a wide variety of approaches from the standard theory to MP).

Also nativism isn't actually the defining characteristic of generative linguistics/grammar (although prevelant in mainstream Chomskyanism. What's important for being "generative" is being a generative system in the mathematical sense of the word. AndrewCarnie

Agree on all points, FWIW. Cadr 11:06, 21 June 2006 (UTC)