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Generative grammar is an approach to the study of language which is explicit, mentalistic, and based on the claim that the ability to acquire language is innately specified.² The approach is concerned with language as a psychologically real object, whose representations can be studied scientifically. In the words of Chomsky (1975, p. 160): “Linguistics is simply that part of psychology that is concerned with one specific class of steady states, the cognitive structures that are employed in speaking and understanding.” Put differently, “[w]e have grammars in our heads” (Smith and Allott 2016, p. 128). We humans come prewired with the ability to create these grammars: We are born with a unique ability to acquire language.

Throughout its history, three questions have been at the center of this approach. They are given in (1).³

1 (1)What constitutes knowledge of language?How is knowledge of language acquired?How is knowledge of language put to use? (Chomsky 1986)

The first question seeks to establish the basis for our linguistic ability. Linguists often speak of this in terms of knowledge, but this is not the kind of knowledge that many philosophers will have in mind. Chomsky (1982, p. 128) says the following:

As I am using the term, knowledge may be unconscious and not accessible to consciousness. It may be “implicit” or “tacit.” No amount of introspection could tell us what we know, or cognize, or use certain rules or principles of grammar, or that use of language involves mental representations formed by these rules and principles. We have no privileged access to such rules and representations.⁴

Furthermore, generative scholars are interested in how children are able to acquire these representations for each variety or language. Lastly, an important question is how we humans utilize these representations in language use.

Since its inception, generative grammar has made at least three fundamental contributions to our understanding of language: (i) viewing grammars as formal/mathematical objects, (ii) viewing linguistics as psychology and biology: studying the emergence and structure of the mental architecture underlying language, (iii) Universal Grammar, the proposal that there is innate, mental structure which is specific to language and that enables children to acquire any language. These results have partly come about through the focus on descriptive adequacy, descriptions of the intrinsic competence of a speaker, and on explanatory adequacy, how a child acquires this intrinsic competence:⁵

To the extent that a linguistic theory succeeds in selecting a descriptively adequate grammar on the basis of primary linguistic data, we can say that it meets the condition of explanatory adequacy. That is, to the extent, it offers an explanation for the intuition of the native speaker on the basis of an empirical hypothesis concerning the innate predisposition of the child to develop a certain kind of theory to deal with the evidence presented to him.” (Chomsky 1965, pp. 25–26; his italics)

This enabled the study of grammars that humans have internalized, unlike, say, studying a finite corpus.

In this chapter, we will outline some of the recent history leading up to contemporary generative grammar. We will first provide some context for the emergence of Principles and Parameters, before we provide the basic gist of the Principles and Parameters approach. Then we introduce the first model that was proposed, namely Government and Binding. This is followed by a discussion of the second and to this date current model, the Minimalist Program, before we try to outline some of the current trends that shape the field of generative grammar. Lastly, we summarize and conclude the chapter.