Current developments in generative grammar

On the Emergence of Scientific Grammar in Iran

Writing the grammar of a language is one of the most significant outputs of linguistic studies. In Iran, it is Avicenna (Ibn-e Sina) who is credited with the first such compilation of the Persian language. Understanding the weaknesses associated with the traditional trends of grammar writing in Iran, contemporary Iranian linguists adopted the modern Western approach following the Chomskyan Turn...

Psycholinguistics, formal grammars, and cognitive science

In the 1980s, Charles Clifton referred to a “psycholinguistic renaissance” in cognitive science. During that time, there was almost unanimous agreement that any self-respecting psycholinguist would make sure to keep abreast of major developments in generative grammar, because a competence model was essential, and the linguistic theory was the proper description of that competence. But today, ma...

A Generative Analysis of the Acquisition of Negation by Iranian EFL Learners: A Typological Study

The present study was an attempt to investigate the acquisition of negationproperties by Persian monolingual and Kurdish-Persian bilingual learners of Englishacross different levels of language proficiency and within a generative framework.Generative models are generally concerned with issues such as universal grammar(UG), language transfer, and morphological variability in nonprimary languaged...

Soheili. A. Reflections on Persian Grammar: Developments in Persian Linguistic Scholarship I. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars publishing, 2017. 283 pp. ISBN: 1-4438-5070-5

What is Optimality Theory?

A. Overview (1) Organization: a. What is generative linguistics and phonology? b. Rule-based phonology c. How OT works d. Predictions of the model e. Acquisition and OT f. Current developments g. Resources B. What is generative linguistics and phonology? (2) Competence vs. performance Generative linguists are interested in describing what a speaker knows about their language, rather than in des...