Contents

  1. Methodological preliminaries
    1. Generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence
    2. Toward a theory of performance
    3. The organization of a generative grammar
    4. Justification of grammars
    5. Formal and substantive universals
    6. Further remarks on descriptive and explanatory theories
    7. On evaluation procedures
    8. Linguistic theory and language learning
    9. Generative capacity and its linguistic relevance
  2. Categories and relations in syntactic theory
    1. The scope of the base
    2. Aspects of deep structure
    3. An illustrative fragment of the base component
    4. Types of base rules
  3. Deep structures and grammatical transformations
  4. Some residual problems
    1. The boundaries of syntax and semantics
    2. The structure of the lexicon

The goal of linguistic theory

Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance. ... [4] To study actual linguistic performance, we must consider the interaction of a variety of factors, of which the underlying competence of the speaker-hearer is only one. ...
We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations). Only under the idealization set forth in the preceding paragraph is performance a direct reflection of competence. In actual fact, it obviously could not directly reflect competence. A record of natural speech will show numerous false starts, deviations from rules, changes of plan in mid-course, and so on. The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system he puts to use in actual performance. (Chomsky 1965:3f)
A "grammar of a language" is "a description of the ideal speaker-hearer's intrinsic competence"

The structure of grammar

The syntactic component specifies an infinite set of abstract formal objects, each of which incorporates all information relevant to a single interpretation of a particular sentence. ... The phonological component of a grammar determines the phonetic form of a sentence generated by the syntactic rules. ... The semantic component determines the semantic interpretation of a sentence. That is, it relates a structure generated by the syntactic component to a certain semantic representation. (p. 16)
Both the phonological and semantic components are therefore purely interpretive. Each utilizes information provided by the syntactic component concerning formatives, their inherent properties, and their interrelations in a given sentence. Consequently, the syntactic component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic interpretation. (p. 16)
"A grammar contains a syntactic component, a semantic component and a phonological component...The syntactic component consists of a base and a transformational component. The base, in turn, consists of a categorial subcomponent and a lexicon. The base generates deep structures. A deep structure enters the semantic component and receives a semantic interpretation; it is mapped by transformational rules into a surface structure, which is then given a phonetic interpretation by the rules of the phonological component. (p. 141)

Resolution of syntactic ambiguity

flying planes is dangerous
flying planes can be dangerous ⇉
flying planes are dangerous

Das folgende ist übernommen aus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspects_of_the_Theory_of_Syntax

Syntactic features

In Chapter 2 of Aspects, Chomsky discusses the problem of subcategorization of lexical categories and how this information should be captured in a generalized manner in the grammar. He deems that rewrite rules are not the appropriate device in this regard. As a solution, he borrows the idea of features from phonology. A lexical category such as noun, verb, etc. is represented by a symbol such as N, V. etc. A set of "subcategorization rules" then analyzes these symbols into "complex symbols", each complex symbol being a set of specified "syntactic features", grammatical properties with binary values. Syntactic feature is one of the most important technical innovations of the Aspects model. Most contemporary grammatical theories have preserved it.