Description about "Mental Grammar"

MENTAL GRAMMAR

The Definition of Mental Grammar

Mental grammar is about grammar in our mind, which consists of academic grammar and grammatical conversation. In other word, it is about the rule that involves all sentences, phrases and the mind of speaker which is applied in our daily conversation. Furthermore, language is produced by left hemisphere in our brain. So when the left hemisphere is damaged, the speaker cannot perform language well.

Grammar and Psycholinguistics

How do speakers produce and understand sentences?

The speakers learn about sentences from both academic environment (school) and non academic environment (family and society). Naturally, they will imitate and then produce sentences as their basic of mental grammar.

Linguistics as psychology

      When people write a description, it is not only about a description about language that they are writing about also a description of what they have learned (Bloomfield). Linguistic as psychology can also be exampled as convenient fiction that is useful for the notational purposes of description (Twaddell). Moreover, Chomsky wrote that the goal of linguistics involve the description of knowledge that people have about language. In conclusion, what is learned and acquired by someone will influence on his/ her linguistics products.

Chomsky’s Competence and Performance Distinction

      Based on Chomsky’s theory, competence is the knowledge that people have of the grammar of their language and, as such, it is the goal of linguistics to describe this competence. For Chomsky, the activities involved in producing and understanding sentences based on the competence are performance process. Then the relationship of competence to performance is competence being a part or component of the whole, which is, performance.

Chomsky’s Grammatical Conceptions

      Chomsky continued to maintain one fundamental notion, which is that the syntax of the grammar is primary with the meaning (and sound) being secondary. The relationship is shown in the following figure. It is about how a grammar is to be organized.

 

The standard theory

      The standard theory was proposed in 1965, which was written by Chomsky in Aspect of the Theory of Syntax. It essentially consists of various set of rules : syntactic, semantic and phonological. The syntactic component consists of two types of syntactic rules, Base Rules and Transformational Rules. Each of these sets of syntactic rules is responsible for an output : the base rules provide Deep Structure while the Transformational Rules, operating on deep structure, provide Surface Structure. The phonological component consists of Phonological rules which operate on the Surface Structure to provide the Phonetic Interpretation of a sentence. The semantic component consists of Semantic rules which operate on the same Surface Structure to provide the Semantic Interpretation of a sentence. All rules above are learnt and stored by people in their mind and will be used in their language output, both written and spoken forms as their mental grammar.

      In Chomsky’s system, deep structure represented the core semantic relations of a sentence, and was mapped on to the surface structure (which followed the phonological form of the sentence very closely) via transformations. While surface structure of a sentence is the final stage in the syntactic representation of a sentence, which provides the input to the phonological component of the grammar, and which thus most closely corresponds to the structure of the sentence we articulate and hear. When the surface structure is generated, it is rendered into a sequence of sound symbols; that product is called the Phonetic interpretation of the sentence.

The government/ binding theory of grammar

      Government theory was first synthesized in Chomsky’s Lectures on Government and Binding in 1981 and then developed in more detail in other publications in the 1980s. The following figure  presents a schema of that grammar. Syntax, meaning and sound remain the same: only syntax is generative. This is the case though Government Binding grammar involves a continuous interaction among components and sub-theories embodying different principles and parameters.

 

Linguistic challenges to Chomsky’s grammar

Challenges to Chomsky’s grammar have mainly stemmed from two sources: (1) disagreement with the organization of his grammar where syntax is given a primary role over semantics and (2) disagreement with the adequacy of his structural characterization of such basic syntactic relations and constituents, particularly Subject, Direct object, Indirect Object and Verb Phrase.

Meaning-based grammars

      Chomsky begins with the specification of syntax, a syntax which functions independently with the meaning and sound forms of sentences being the output of that Syntax. In Chomsky’s terms, only syntax is ‘generative’. Semantics and phonetics play secondary roles, functioning only to interpret the syntactic structure which is provided as input. The role of syntax was to provide the proper Surface Structure of a sentence. The schema of this conception of grammar is shown in the following figure.

				Phonological Rules

 

      This schema differs in a number of important characteristics from Chomsky’s conception of grammar. Firstly, semantics is given the primary role. Syntax is given only secondary role, which is to provide a realization of the semantic representation. Then there is only one type of syntactic rule, the Transformational; there are no Phrase Structure rules. Accordingly, there is only one level of syntactic representation, Surface Structure; there is no Deep structure. For example, ‘the shoe hurts’ with its complex prepositional structure of arguments and predicates, transformation rules with the lexicon would apply to provide the surface syntactic form of NP (‘the shoe’) + V (‘hurts’).