Generative

Generative may refer to:

  • Generative actor, a person who instigates social change
  • Generative art, art that has been generated, composed, or constructed in an algorithmic manner
  • Generative music, music that is ever-different and changing, and that is created by a system

Math and science

  • Generative Anthropology, a field of study based on the theory that history of human culture is a genetic or "generative" development stemming from the development of language
  • Generative model, a model for randomly generating observable data in probability and statistics
  • Generative programming, a type of computer programming in which some mechanism generates a computer program to allow human programmers write code at a higher abstraction level
  • Generative sciences, an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary science that explores the natural world and its complex behaviours as a generative process
  • Generative systems, systems that use a few basic rules to yield patterns which can be extremely varied and unpredictable

Language

  • Generative grammar, a set of rules predicting which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences
  • Generative Lexicon, a theory of semantics which focuses on the distributed nature of compositionality in natural language
  • Generative linguistics, a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar
  • Generative principle, the idea in foreign language teaching that humans have the capacity to generate an infinite number of phrases from a finite grammatical competence
  • Generative semantics, an approach developed from transformational generative grammar that assumes that deep structures are the sole input to semantic interpretation

Famous quotes containing the word generative:

    Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.
    Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)

    The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)