prescriptive vs descriptive rules
generative grammar is about rules and it is called grammatical rules
it aims to study syntactic knowledge, i.e. the grammatical rules that native speaker subconsciously know
There are two ways in observing this: prescriptive grammar and descriptive grammar
prescriptive: how they are supposed to use the language
descriptive how speakers actually use the language
It is considered to be used in generative grammar
It is considered as science
Scientific method
collect and observe data
make generalizations
develop hypotheses
Sources of data
grammatical rules stored in speakers' mind
corpora
Method: the grammaticality judgment task
Levels of adequacy
Observational adequacy / the lowest quality
Descriptive adequacy / better than observational adequacy
Explanatory adequacy / the highest level
corpus data
corpus data
native speaker intuition
corpus data
native speaker intuition
how children acquire the language