Grammaticality Judgments
When generative grammar was first proposed, it was widely hailed as a way of formalizing the implicit set of rules a person "knows" when they know their native language and produce grammatical utterances in it (grammaticality intuitions). However Chomsky has repeatedly rejected that interpretation; according to him, the grammar of a language is a statement of what it is that a person has to know in order to recognize an utterance as grammatical, but not a hypothesis about the processes involved in either understanding or producing language.
Read more about this topic: Generative Grammar
Famous quotes containing the word judgments:
“Judgments, value judgments concerning life, whether for or against it, can in the end never be true: their only value is as symptoms, they only come into consideration as symptoms—in themselves such judgments are stupidities. We must reach out and attempt to put our finger on this astonishing finesse, that the value of life cannot be assessed.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)