The Organisation of the Grammar

Abstract

In the last chapter, we considered the generative phonology (GP) approach to phonological rules and representations. We said that a generative grammar is a model of the native speaker’s unconscious linguistic knowledge. We also claimed that this knowledge is organised such that there are distinct areas of syntactic, semantic and phonological knowledge. These hypotheses are reflected in the modular organisation of the generative grammar of a language: we depict these different sorts of knowledge as discrete, but interacting, modules, or components, within the grammar. Let us see how this is done within the model of generative grammar assumed by Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle in their 1968 book The Sound Pattern of English (often abbreviated to ‘SPE’). This model, which was developed and applied to other languages by phonologists in the late sixties and early seventies, is usually referred to as ‘the SPE model’ or ‘the standard model’ of generative phonology.