The Acquisition of Syntax.

Abstract

them to go beyond the speech they have actually heard and practiced to the creation of lawful novelties. If new monosyllables are created, speakers of will agree that is English than ftug. Probably this is because they have a shared implicit knowledge of the initial consonant clusters that are acceptable in English. If this new word is to be pluralized, they will agree that stug/-z/ is better than stug/-s/. Probably this is because they have shared knowledge of a rule of regular inflection. If the new word is first heard in the sentence: Here is some stug they will agree that a second sentence: is there is more likely to be grammatical than a second sentence: A is there. Probably this is because they have shared knowledge of the syntactic rules for the employment of mass nouns. The construction rules of which speakers have implicit knowledge are, in their explicit form, the grammar of a language. As these rules have been written down in traditional grammars, they constitute a collection of largely unrelated statements about such matters as the parts-of-speech, paradigms of conjugation and declension, the marking of gender, and the agreement of adjectives and nouns. Chomsky (I957) has shown that it may be possible to systematize traditional grammar into a mechanism for the generation of all the sentences of a language that are grammatical and none that are ungrammatical. Grammar becomes a theory for a range of phenomenathe sentences of a language-and also a program for generating sentencesa program that might be followed by an electronic device (Yngve, I96I).