A CRITIQUE OF NOAM CHOMSKY’S TRANSFORMATIONAL

GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

EJABENA HARRISON OGHENERUKWE

ARP15/16/H/0191

COURSE COORDINATOR: DR. AKIN AKANDE

INTRODUCTION
This paper is an attempt at establishing an evaluative critique of Noam Chomsky’s
generative grammar. Noam Chomsky views grammar as “a system of rules that in some explicit
and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences” (Chomsky 1965:8). This
‘system of rules’ according to Chomsky is innate to the human mind; this stance of his is further
enhanced by his adopted mentalist approach to the study of language which is based on the
foundational principle of ‘innateness’. The mentalist view of linguistics as the bedrock of
Chomsky’s opinion is based on the ‘Langue’ and ‘Parole’ concept previously devised by the
foremost Structuralist, Ferdinand de sassure. In Transformational Generative Grammar, the
langue and parole is interpreted to mean ‘Competence’ and ‘Performance’. Competence is the
tasic knowledge of the speaker that Chomsky believes is imbued and inbred. Performance is
however referred to as ‘language in use’ in real life situations; that is the different form of usage
to which language is employed. In the course of exploring Transformational Generative
Grammar through the eye of Chomsky’s Universal grammar, other school of thoughts in
grammar will be employed as a foil to critique Chomsky’s grammar by paying attention to areas
where these grammars compliments Chomsky’s grammar.

INDEX TERMS: Transformational grammar, Universal grammar, Competence, Performance,

Functionalism, Behaviourism, Structuralism.

TRANSFORMATIONAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR

The concept of transformational generative grammar arises from the believe that sentences as
a unit of grammatical analysis possesses transformational capabilities; this capabilities made
possible by one dominant feature of grammar which is ‘recursiveness’, that is the expansion of
the kernel sentences to produce many more rule-governed sentences that are plausible and
correct by all standards. The kernel sentence is one that has not undergone any form of
transformation (i.e. transformational processes such as negation, passivization and interrogation
have not been applied to it). The kernel sentence is often in the ‘SP’ format as in ‘girls sing’,
‘dogs bark’, birds chirp, goats bleat, boys sweat etc. from the examples stated above many other
varieties can be generated such that the above sentences can be re-produced in an SPA, SPAA,
SPAAA format and many more. For example:
i. Boys sweat profusely (SPA)
ii. Goats bleat incessantly in the morning (SPAA)
iii. Birds chirp sonorously in the jungle whenever they are feeding
iv. Bees buzz in the morning, sometimes at noon, but mostly at night (SPAAA)
From the above illustrations, instances of the generative power of grammar is seen, from an
ordinary surface knowledge of grammatical structure in the form of ‘SP’, a diverse set of rules
governed sentences can be generated in the form of SPA, SPAA, SPAAA and so on. This
however lends credence to the essence of Transformational grammar which is ‘well-formedness’,
and well-formedness can be achieved if the generated sentences follows the set rules.
 A generative grammar needs laws of transformation which can explain and show how
language can skip from deep structure to surface structure; Transformational-Generative
Grammar also posits the existence of deep and surface structure form existing in any human
language. This is reflected in the native speaker/hearer’s ability to understand and to produce
novel grammatical structures in his language and he is able to correct them.
Chomsky (1965) argues that structural description is too superficial because it only
describes the surface structure of the language and thus could not explain the relationship of
meaning which is quite clearly there but which is not realized in the surface structure. The
surface structure of a sentence does not reveal everything we should know about a
sentence. It is through the underlying structure or the “deep structure” of a sentence that we get
its full meaning. Transformational grammar is known as psychological grammar because it tries
to find out what goes on in the mind of the native speaker. In the deep structure, the apparently
simple sentence such as, ‘The Man bought the Dog’ would in a very simplified term be like this
in the deep structure:
S

NP VP

D N V NP

D N

The Man Bought

The Dog

The resulting sentence is ‘The Man bought the Dog’; such diagrams as this is also called
a ‘Phrase marker’. According to Chomsky, the grammar of a language is a statement of what it is
that a person has to know in order to recognize an utterance as grammatical, but not a hypothesis
about the processes involved in either understanding or producing language. The deep structure
represented the core semantic relations of a sentence and was mapped on the surface structure
through transformations. Chomsky believed that there would be considerable similarities
between languages deep structures, and that these structures would reveal properties common to
all languages, which were concealed by their surface structures.

According to Chomsky (1965:16) the deep structure is abstract and deals with meaning
and the surface structure deals with the actual sounds (utterances) in the language. The deep and
surface structures are linked by linguistic transformations capable of adding, detecting, changing,
attaching, etc. one at a time, until the surface structure is reached.
 Competence and Performance are recurrent themes in the study of Transformational
generative grammar; and are the major reference point for the appraisal and critique of
Chomsky’s generative grammar. Competence deals with the innate, intrinsic knowledge of the
language which is expected of every native speaker, it is the speaker or hearer’s knowledge of
the language situations. According to Chomsky, in a bid to test the level of competence in a
speaker, the intuition of the speaker’s repertoire of the language should be examined.
Performance on the other hand has to do with the ‘functionality of the language’; it deals with
‘actual utterances’ and the possible reactions and counter-reactions that can be elicited from
these utterances.
At the level of performance, situational contexts have a big role to play in the use of
language. The way and manner in which the immediate environment makes sense of the
individual’s utterances has a huge influence on the language functionality in this sense.
Considering the fact that these utterances are not static, the concept of ‘hyper-correction’ comes
to the fore to make up for these anomally, hyper-correction is a situation whereby the situational
context of a speaker or hearer has a has a huge impact on the performance (output) of the
individual; this way the individual conditions himself to fit in the context he finds his or herself
at any point in time. Such that the performance output he exerts in his speech and
communication while in the formal environment like say a church, an office or an educational
facility is quite difference from his speech and disposition while at an informal environment like
a market, a traditional occasion, a relaxation spot etc. it has been said that the situational context
in which the speaker or hearer finds his or herself has a huge impact on the performance (output)
of the speaker; several contextual factors influences performance.
In this sense, physiological factors, psychological factors, cultural factors, educational
factors etc. A good example of the influence of physiological factors on a speaker’s performance
is evident in the average Hausa individual’s production of the voiced labio-dental fricative /f/
sound in place of the voiced bi-labial plosive /p/ in words such as people, pastor etc. To an
educated Hausa individual that is a victim of such physiological phenomenon he knows that he
should be including the sound /p/ in the pronunciation of the stated words at the level of
linguistic competence, but at the performance level he finds himself in shallow waters as he
tends to become more vulnerable during spontaneous speeches when he is not overtly conscious
of his utterances, probably during an interview section, television show or a public lecture.
Socio-linguistic factors such as Age, gender, Sex, Tribal background, Religion etc.)
In an attempt to critique Chomsky’s idea of Transformational generative grammar, his
theory of ‘Universal grammar’ will be examined for flaws and weaknesses as well as its
contributory insight to the overall study of grammar. Juxtapositions will be made with reference
to other schools of thought whose views make up for the weaknesses of Chomsky’s Universal
grammar. The behaviourists, the structuralist and the Functionalists views will be explored in a
bid to critique Chomsky’s grammar.
CHOMSKY’S UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Noam Chomsky’s idea of ‘Universal grammar’ that is a set of language rules that are
innate to the human child. He is of the opinion that every native speaker has a tacit knowledge of
the basic rules governing the grammar of their language; he however tags this ‘innate
grammatical knowledge’ as Universal grammar that is applicable to all human children. He
posits that the basic grammatical rules of the native speaker’s language are imbued from birth, as
a result it is upon this knowledge that he builds upon as he gradually achieves competence in the
language.
Noam Chomsky (1957) maintains that the grammar of any language should be one that
accounts for native speaker/learner competence. Simply put, given a limited number of symbols,
and a set of finite rules operating in a language, the native speaker should be able to generate an
infinite set of grammatical sentences by applying the rules over and over again. One of the
contributions of Transformational Generative Grammar in language description is making a
distinction between competence and performance. Chomsky (1965:4) sees competence as the
speaker’s/hearer’s knowledge of his language while performance is the actual use of language in
concrete situations. He states that although the rules of the language are in the brain of the native
speaker, he may at times make mistakes in speech or writing due to extra-linguistic factors.
Based on this, he advises that language acquisition should not only be concerned with
performance but also be interested in competence. An interesting implication of this fact is
that if grammars model competence, a grammar of a language must tell you not only what you
can say in the language, but also what you cannot say, since native speaker competence includes
not only the ability to make the judgment that certain types of sentences are grammatical, but
also the ability to judge that others are not grammatical.
Therefore, his grammar is not as interested in speech or writing (performance) of the
native speaker like as intuitions which help in interpretation of words, phrases and the
sentences in their native language. Chomsky believes that by studying the native speaker’s
usage, it is possible to arrive at these underlying rules that guide the use of the language.
Chomsky gave a distinction between competence and performance. A simple way of seeing the
distinction between competence and performance is in our capacity to understand the meaning of
words we have never encountered before.

For example, the expression ‘multi-national’ is a compound statement; it is an expression

that people may have never seen. Conversely, if the hearer knows the meaning of the prefix
‘multi’ and the basic word formation rule in English, then, it is easier to understand that multi-
national refers to an entity belonging to ‘several’ nations or representatives of ‘several’ nations.
This process of interpretation will not be possible unless there is an underlying competence
which can operate separately from the performance feature of the language.
 BEHAVIOURISM VERSUS CHOMSKIAN UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
The major principle of the Behaviourist’s approach to grammar is based on the fact that
human and animal learning is based on ‘Habit formation’. B.F Skinner, a major proponent of the
behaviorist point of view in his work ‘Verbal behaviour’ he mentioned the ‘operant conditioning
model’ and ‘classical conditioning model’. The operant conditioning model deals with Parents
reinforcement of language learning through continuous inputs, while the classical conditioning
model is about word learning based on association. He postulated that human behaviour with
respect to language acquisition and learning is guided by the three principles of Stimulus,
Response and Reinforcement. This behaviourist theory of stimulus-response synergy as a form
of habit formation process is considered the basic stand-point of behaviourism; this theory is
reminiscent of Ivan Pavlov’s experiment which summated that stimulus and response works
together; According to him the human baby obtain native language habits through ‘imitation’,
the baby tries to imitate the oral speech that is communicated to him by adults in his immediate
environment.
This imitation process is reflected in his attempt at reproducing his perceived oral speech
in the similitude of babblings and incoherent speeches. Since for his efforts at reproducing the
words communicated to him he is rewarded by virtue of commendation, this reward elicits
(stimulus) further attempts at articulating these sounds and words; he would mispronounce words
by way of alienating certain syllables at first instance; he also has the tendency to apply all the
previously conceived ideas about sentence and word formations without paying heed to the
possible existence of exceptions to the existing rules. For example, his pre-conceived idea of
generalization in the form of adding the affix ‘-ed’ to words to form the past tense has all the
tendency to influence his mistaking the word ‘go’ to have the past participle of ‘goed’ instead of
‘went’, the past tense of ‘do’ to be ‘doed’ or the plural format of the word ‘sheep’ to be ‘sheeps’
etc.
This complication in his language learning process as seen above conditions him to
commit errors; By age five or six the babblings and mutterings recedes and socialized speech
comes to the fore because at this stage, the child is expected to have gained a considerable
amount of experience such that many of his utterances become almost undistinguishable from
that of the average adult around him.
In conclusion, the behaviourist theory posits that children develop a natural affinity to
learn the language of their immediate, social environment through habit formation as a result of a
constant trial and error process (stimuli-response) until he gradually learns through the process of
imitation to make finer discernations and discriminations as well as paying attention to the
exceptions to the rule of the grammar of his language until his utterances synchronizes
approximately with that of the immediate environment in which he is growing.
All said and done, the behaviourist based their philosophy on ‘habit formation’ from
experience. The implication is that language acquisition as well as competence in the native
language can only be gained from experience arising from environmental interactions over a
period of time. This is however a contradistinction to Chomskyan beliefs which is informed by
the mentalist philosophy of ‘innateness’ of the basic grammatical rules of phonology, syntax, and
morphology in the human brain, according to mentalists and nativists, humans are biologically
wired to learn language at a particular time in a particular way, Chomsky however referred to
this special innate mechanism as Language Acquisition Device (LAD), a language-learning
mechanism embodying knowledge about the general nature of grammars.
In as much as the human ability to create and understand language is imbued and innate
as is observable in the development of human babies and toddlers, although they display a large
body of embedded knowledge about the structure of language, they still need to ‘learn’ the
features of the grammar of the language they are exposed to so as to enable them graduate from
linguistic competence to a more complex linguistic performance; their experiences from
interactions with the environment will help condition them to make use of language to perform
different functions in different context they find themselves. At the level of performance, the
notion of hyper-correction comes to play as the child becomes acquainted with what is
acceptable and what is not acceptable in certain context; the situational context has a huge
bearing on the child at the level of performance such that the way he communicates in an
informal context is a stark difference from his interaction in a formal context.
This informs the restrictiveness of chomskian universal grammar, chomsky’s refusal to
acknowledge the influence of the child’s immediate environment on language acquisition and
learning can be considered a flaw. His refusal to accept the behaviourist view as valid and
applicable is made evident by his constant criticism of B.F Skinner and other behaviourist that
share same view. He often stress in his criticism of the behaviourists that language is not learned
as behaviour is learnt but innate and exclusive to humans alone. The question therefore is: if the
basic rules of the grammar of the child’s language is innate and the environment is not useful to
his grammatical competence, what accounts for the frequent errors in the child’s communication,
the mispronunciations of certain words and non-adherence to the exceptions to the rule of the
grammar of the language? The simple answer is the environment and experience, the adults in
the child’s environment through the stimuli-response synergy assists the child to build on his
innate grammatical knowledge by correcting anomalies in his speech; this constant
reinforcement on the parts of observing adults assists him to fully internalize all the rules of the
grammar not just basic rules

FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR VERSUS CHOMSKIAN UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

The late 1950’s saw the development in linguistics arising from the works of the Prague
school and J.R Firth. The proponents of this school of thought: Michael Halliday and Andre
Matinet (1908-1999) stressed the semantic perspective of Ferdinand de sassure’s logic about
signs and their functions in the world and that language developed the way it did because of the
uses it was put to. The most prominent of the Functional linguistics is the Systemic functional
linguistics as an offshoot; first introduced by Halliday, it refers to a new approach to the study of
grammar that is radically different from the traditional view which states that language is a set of
rules for specifying grammatical structures. In this view, language is a resource making meaning
hence a tool for creating meaning by means of wordings. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999, p.3)
clarify their position with respect to Systemic functional linguistics as follows:
“For the task of constructing such a meaning base, we shall use a systemic grammar; a systemic
grammar is one of the classes of functional grammars motivated, or ‘natural’, in contradistinction
to formal grammars, which are autonomous and therefore semantically arbitrary, in a systemic
grammar every category is based on meaning. It has a semantic as well as formal, lexico-
grammatical reference”.
The above position of the systemic functional linguists gives a lot of credence to the
sassurean concept of ‘signifiers’ and ‘signified’ as semantic concepts of attaching meanings to
things and situations. The Functionalist grammar is basically ‘semantically-oriented’ because it
is concerned not just with competence in the native language of the speaker but the performance
aspect is put into consideration (i.e. how language is used to perform different functions with the
primary aim of meaning inference and realization).
This is however a weakness of chomsky’s ‘Universal grammar’, it’s over-emphasis on
the competence aspect of the sassurean concept of ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ is an Achilles heel,
Chomsky’s failure to give credence and recognition to the performance aspect of language use;
which is the way and manner we make use of our language skills as native speakers when
speaking ordinary and natural language. This performance skill opens the door to an endless
number of possibilities for the use of language to suit different situations.
Moreover, another clog in Chomsky’s Universal grammar arises from his argument that
every language shares a common genetic origin which entails the grammatical principles
underlying languages are innate and fixed; and are not the outcome of communicative functions
(Performance). So, he submitted by stating that these principles are not simply learned from the
environment like the functionalists and those of the behavioural sciences explained. Grammar as
Chomsky explained can be pictured as ‘generative’ in nature, Since it produces an infinite
number of utterances, including new ones, using a limited set of innate grammatical rules and
finite set of terms. He therefore stated that so many of the properties of a ‘generative grammar’
arise from an innate, fixed, and biologically-programmed ‘Universal grammar’.
Moreso, from the juxtaposition of Chomsky’s approach to generative grammar and the
Systemic functional linguistics view of grammar, a contradistinction in both schools of thought
can be summarized as Prescriptiveness which is a major characteristic of Chomskyan grammar
versus the descriptiveness of Functional grammar. Universal grammar tells us how language is
acquired through imbued grammatical rules by a native speaker till competence is achieved, but
it does not tell us the several, specific functions to which language is put to use. These salient
functions of language are accounted for by the functionalists unlike the ‘Grammar as rule’ theory
propounded in Chomsky’s grammar.
The Functionalist’s position takes the ‘resource perspective’ rather than the ‘rule
perspective’. It is designed to display the innards of the overall system of grammar rather than
just the surface components; that is why it is referred to as ‘Systemic’ in nature. For instance,
while the sentence is the unit of grammatical analysis in Chomsky’s Universal grammar, the
functionalists go way deeper by making the whole text, the unit of linguistic/grammatical
analysis; this can be clarified in terms of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic study of language
which has its origin in Ferdinand de sassure’s Structuralist grammar. It is worthy of note to state
that both Chomsky and Functionalist grammarians both subscribe to De sassure’s view of
grammar as existing as a ‘Structure’ but differ only in their view of how those structures should
be analyzed.
Furthermore, Functional grammar is semantically-oriented because it concerns how
language is used to perform different functions in the native speaker’s environment, not just
achieving competence and the ability to generate sentences and expressions from previously
existing innate rules; it is possible for a sentence or utterance to be linguistically correct and rule
guided but semantically or contextually incorrect. This is the juncture where Performance has an
upper hand over Competence in a language use.
Functional linguistics considers the semantic and pragmatic content of sentences and not
just whether the sentence is grammatically correct or incorrect. It takes a deeper approach to
language analysis by subjecting the speaker’s utterance to generally accepted rules of not just the
grammar of his language but that of his environment as well. For instance, a sentence like ‘My
Father is stupid’ is grammatically correct by all standards, but semantically unacceptable and
incorrect in certain contexts like the African context, or to a more narrowed view, the Nigerian
context. The sentence will be adjudged as unacceptable because cultural factors come to play in
such situation, in the Nigerian context, a high premium is placed on respect for the elderly;
Socio-linguistic factors have a huge bearing on language performance in this sense. Other factors
such as Psychological factors, Physiological factors, Cultural factors and many more also
applies.
In a nutshell, Chomsky did not put the dynamic nature of language in mind while
propounding his theory of innate Universal grammar. The rules of grammar of languages have
been subjected to change since the inception of language; it takes more than innate knowledge of
the basic principles of a language for a native speaker to fit into his immediate environment
linguistically. The diachronic study of language over time has given rise to possible multi-
faceted meanings that is applicable to a single word or expression depending on the experience
of the hearer.
According to Hawkins (2001), “Chomsky’s submission was done in error. Chomsky’s
repeated assertions that he is dealing with an ‘ideal’ speaker-listener do not carry conviction in
view of his neglect of the importance of a listener’s reaction to the interpretation of what he or
she hears”. This point is stressed by chomskyan grammar’s inability to account for ambiguity in
semantic meaning of a sentence such as: Bank dances till day-break, Jesus is the husband of the
church etc. to a native speaker of a language operating on innate grammatical rules that informs
him that ‘a bank’ and ‘a church’ are places of financial transaction and that of worship
respectively; ambiguity sets in at this point; as he wonders how a building of sorts can ‘dance’ or
a man ‘married’ to a building; it takes a native speaker operating at the level of linguistic
performance to decipher this expression.
CONCLUSION
Drawing upon the views of the functionalists and the behaviourists in their approach to
language acquisition and structure the shortcomings of chomskyan grammar is observed. But
chomskyan grammar is not without its advantages to language study. Chomsky’s grammar has
exposed us to the recursive nature of grammar; hereby empowering us to become creative in
communicative discourses we engage ourselves; it laid the foundation on which we can build on
to attain performance in language use.
Although it is prescriptive in nature, yet it invented grammatical rules that remain as
blueprints till today; ‘S = NP + VP’ is a sentence structure that is applicable to grammar till
today; however, it is not applicable to the grammar of all languages of the world as some
language experience alterations in sentence structure such as the verbal element (VP) coming
before the Noun phrase (NP), such scenarios can however be classified as exceptions to the rule
that Chomsky himself should have considered before generalizing the rules as applicable to all
languages.

REFERENCES

Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: Mass, the MIT Press.
Hawkins, R. (2001). Second language Syntax: A Generative Introduction. New York: Blackwell
publishers.
Halliday, M., & Matthiessen, C. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd ed).
London: Arnold.
Halliday, M., & Matthiesen, C. (1999). Construing Experience through Meaning, London:
Cassell.
Hymes, D. (1999) towards communicative competence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.