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      Strong Generative Capacity and the Empirical Base of Linguistic Theory

      brief-report
      Frontiers in Psychology
      Frontiers Media S.A.
      generative grammar, grammaticality, acceptability, evidence, methodology

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          Abstract

          This Perspective traces the evolution of certain central notions in the theory of Generative Grammar (GG). The founding documents of the field suggested a relation between the grammar, construed as recursively enumerating an infinite set of sentences, and the idealized native speaker that was essentially equivalent to the relation between a formal language (a set of well-formed formulas) and an automaton that recognizes strings as belonging to the language or not. But this early view was later abandoned, when the focus of the field shifted to the grammar's strong generative capacity as recursive generation of hierarchically structured objects as opposed to strings. The grammar is now no longer seen as specifying a set of well-formed expressions and in fact necessarily constructs expressions of any degree of intuitive “acceptability.” The field of GG, however, has not sufficiently acknowledged the significance of this shift in perspective, as evidenced by the fact that (informal and experimentally-controlled) observations about string acceptability continue to be treated as bona fide data and generalizations for the theory of GG. The focus on strong generative capacity, it is argued, requires a new discussion of what constitutes valid empirical evidence for GG beyond observations pertaining to weak generation.

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          Most cited references28

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          Syntactic Structures

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            On certain formal properties of grammars

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              Rules and representations

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Psychol
                Front Psychol
                Front. Psychol.
                Frontiers in Psychology
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1664-1078
                21 September 2017
                2017
                : 8
                : 1617
                Affiliations
                Department of Linguistics, University of Ottawa Ottawa, ON, Canada
                Author notes

                Edited by: Ángel J. Gallego, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

                Reviewed by: Naoki Fukui, Sophia University, Japan; Ricardo Etxepare, UMR5478 Centre de Recherche sur la Langue et les Textes Basques (IKER), France; Norbert Hornstein, University of Maryland, College Park, United States

                *Correspondence: Dennis Ott dennis.ott@ 123456post.harvard.edu

                This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

                Article
                10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01617
                5613309
                0902c335-5b9d-40c5-95f3-025d5ed8c946
                Copyright © 2017 Ott.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 29 April 2017
                : 04 September 2017
                Page count
                Figures: 0, Tables: 0, Equations: 0, References: 31, Pages: 5, Words: 3987
                Funding
                Funded by: University of Ottawa 10.13039/100008572
                Categories
                Psychology
                Perspective

                Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry
                generative grammar,grammaticality,acceptability,evidence,methodology

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