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