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Show system of -rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance. 1113 Similar!Y, Glassie contends, students of artifacts must work from observeable things to "create a systematic model that accounts for the design ability of an idealized maker--a sort of artifactual grammar. 1114 In order to be learned and effectively used by people, such a rule system must by nature be closed, for it is the shared knowledge of a fixed set of rules which in the end allows communication. It is obvious, however, that neither all sentences nor all houses are the same, and therefore, however circumscribed, a grammar must also allow for creativity. It is in this area that the theories of Chomsky are particularly important to the student of artifacts. 15 Among modern linguists, it is Chomsky who has most directly addressed the issue of creativity in language, that is, the speaker 1 s ability to produce a potentially infinite number of sentences from a finite vocabulary and a finite set of rules~ 16 In Chomsky 1 s view, an adequate grammar would not attempt to describe all the sentences of a language, of which there are indefinite number, but one that gives the rules for generating the sentences of that language. 11 Linguistic I competence, 11 the speakers knowlege of the language, allows new sentences to be created that will be nevertheless understandable because they adhere to the formal regularities of the grammar. Chomsky described linguistic competence as a series of transformations moving from the deep structure of minimal units to the surface structure of the complex sentence. The speaker is able, by using rules of concatenation, to produce simple linear strings, what Chomsky calls sentences. 11 11 kernal From this level of base concepts, transforming rules are 91 |
