1.1.2. From Syntactic structures to The Minimalist
Program: what has fundamentally changed?
This subsection aims at presenting the evolution of generative
grammar. The emphasis is laid on the different mutations as far as the
computational procedures as well as representations are concerned.
1.1.2.1. From Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) to
Government and Binding Theory
The first step of Generative Grammar is Phrase Structure
Grammar (PSG) proposed in syntactic structures and refined in
Aspects of theory syntax. The model of generative grammar presented in
Chomsky (1957) uses vocabulary that includes variable category symbols that may
be rewritten to represent syntactic structures. It was based on Phrase
Structure Rules that are made up of rewritten rules. The latter generates
phrase markers associated with strings of morphemes that underlie the kernel
sentence. The sentence is represented by the Ó/S symbol, sentences are
derived from top to bottom starting with the category Ó/S.
Unfortunately, the 1957 model described here presents a
certain number of lacunae which pushes Chomsky to refine it in
Aspects. One of those lacunae is recursion. As we said, the backbone
of PSG was phrase structure rules which are rewritable and unlimited. Then, the
rules were recursive. The fact of repeating rules leads to ungrammaticality.
Recursion leads to infiniteness in derivation of syntactic structures.
Furthermore, Phrase Structure Grammar has just one level of representation,
surface structure, the actual representation of sentence in the way it is
spelled out. Due to this, PSG can't disambiguate all ambiguities and can't
account for some derived constructions such as passives, interrogatives...etc.
This was found explanatorily inadequate since it could not explain the relevant
phenomena in natural languages. Chomsky (1965) tried to overcome those
weaknesses by introducing another level of representation namely the deep
structure. In fact, Chomsky claims that there must be a pair of structural
descriptions for each sentence (Deep Structure «DS» and Surface
Structure «SS»). This was another considerable breakthrough in the
attempt to reach the descriptive and explanatory adequacy. The transformational
rules (T-rules) apply cyclically to the constituents at this level to derive
those in the surface structure. The deep structure contains the information
relevant to semantic interpretation whereas surface structure deals with the
information relevant to phonetic interpretation. This mutation can be
graphically represented as shown below:
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Figure 3 : The models of grammar developed within the early
generative grammar
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Phrase Structure Grammar (Chomsky 1957)
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Extended Standard Theory (Chomsky 1965)
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Lexicon
Surface
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Ps-rules
Structure
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Lexicon PS-rules
Deep Structure semantic interpretation
T-rules
Surface Structure phonetic interpretation
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Source: Adapted from Howard Lasnik and Terje Lohndal (2013)
The review of the Extended Standard Theory (EST) gave birth to
the Revised Extended Standard Theory (REST) (Chomsky 1976). These models
finally gave birth to a new conception of Generative Grammar known as
Government and Binding Theory (GBT) or the Principles and Parameters Theory
(PPT) which is the basis of the Minimalist Program.
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