Generative Grammar

Generative grammar is the theory that a language's grammar can be stated as a finite set of formal rules that generate every grammatical sentence of the language and no ungrammatical ones, rather than as a list of examples or historical forms. Noam Chomsky introduced the theory in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures and later argued that the human capacity to acquire such a rule system is innate and common to the species, a position he called universal grammar. Chomsky and other linguists have pointed to Panini's Sanskrit grammar, the Ashtadhyayi, composed roughly two and a half thousand years earlier, as generative in the same formal sense, deriving the whole of classical Sanskrit from a compact, ordered system of rules.