pdf Lectures on Government and Binding مجانا للكاتب نعوم تشومسكي
Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures
From its inception in the 1950s, the Chomskyan brand of linguistics has been concerned with a person's knowledge of language, the unconscious mental knowledge that makes him a native speaker of some language. This innate, unobservable knowledge of language is called the speaker's linguistic competence, whereas his outward linguistic behavior which provides the linguist with observable data is called his linguistic performance. Generative grammar tries to provide an adequate model of linguistic competence. When such a grammar can generate (i.e. provide an explicit structural description for) all the grammatical (i.e. syntactically well-formed) sentences of a language and successfully detect all the ungrammatical sentences, it is called observationally adequate. But this kind of adequacy does not provide a sufficiently adequate model of linguistic competence. If the grammar can systematically and accurately describe the adult speaker's linguistic competence, it is called descriptively adequate. If a grammar can describe the acquisition of this linguistic competence in a human child from its initial state to the final state, then it is said to have explanatory adequacy. In Government and Binding theory, Chomsky is interested in the initial state of linguistic competence in a child, which is called a human's biological endowment for language. Since every normal human child is capable of acquiring any language, this endowment is also called by the name of universal grammar.