MENTAL GRAMMAR

Mental Grammar is the knowledge of language that allows a person to produce and understand utterances, or represent knowledge of a speaker that they have.

1.      Grammar and Psycholinguistics

1.1.       How do speakers produce and understand sentences?

Linguistics was very complex. So here, will discus about a language or what speakers know about language? One has different meaning in psycholinguistics.

1.2.            Linguistics as psychology

Bloomfield argued focus on writing. It was about a description of language and about what the people have learned of language. On the contrary Twaddell focused on the description of language as the goal for linguistics. Moreover, in 1960s Chomsky comes down on the side of psychology linguistics. He writes the thesis and he said the psychology is branch of linguistics.

2.      Chomsky’s Competence and Performance Distinction

Chomsky view psycholinguistics theory into two major goals: (1) specify how people use competence to understand and able to produce the sentence. (2) Specify to acquire competence (grammatical knowledge). Chomsky uses the term competence to indicate a certain kind of language knowledge, or unconscious knowledge of language. Based on above explanation, competence is the first goal of linguistics. Moreover, Chomsky’s view two point of psycholinguistics, first, how the people use competence to produce and understand sentences, second, how people learn grammatical knowledge (competence).

Linguistic performance explains about sentence production and sentence comprehension.

Sentence production is the practical application of speech with the grammatical flaws and mistakes that exist among real-world speakers. Then sentence comprehension is when speakers to understand each other despite grammatical flaws and differences in dialect.

3.      Chomsky’s grammatical conceptions

In 1957 Chomsky comes out his book Syntactic Structure. And this book revolutionize linguistics and influenced a number of social science especially psychology and anthropology.  When the speaker understand of system that used by speakers to produce language based on grammatical sentences. The primary grammar is syntax and sound as the second one. So the meaning of sentence was classified by function of syntactic form.

3.2.       The standard theory

It was consists of various sets of rules: syntactic is learn about sentence structure and phrase, there are two syntactic level: deep structure (explain about transformation of sentences) and surface structure (in the end of syntactic representation). Semantic is learning about literal meaning of sentences, phrases, words, and morphemes. Phonological is sound system of particular language.

·                Phrase structure rules, Lexicon and Deep Structure.

Essentially to provide an analysis of a sentence into underlying phrases which are further analysis of a sentence into word and word part.  In transformational grammar, deep structures are generated by phrase-structure rules, and surface structures are derived from deep structures by a series of transformations.

·                               Transformational rules and Surface Structure

In transformational rules, surface structure correspondent to the version of the sentence that can be spoken by heard. On the contrary, deep structure is an abstract representation that identifies the ways a sentence can be analyzed and interpreted.

·      Phonological rules and phonetic interpretation

It has function to change the surface structure into a phonetic interpretation, by using phonetic symbol. It is pronunciations of the sentences.

·                               Semantics Rules and Semantics Interpretations

It will discuss from Chomsky’s grammar. In semantics rules need surface structure and deep structure, but in deep structure there is no the meaning of the sentence. In semantic interpretations provides that specifications.

3.3.       The Government/ Binding (GB) theory of grammar.

In Chomsky’s theory of Government explain that every word has the level of the sentence depend on the function of Binding theory. Then the relationship of deep structure and surface structure is only terms of some situations, like what, where from, where to, how far can be moved?

4.      Linguistic challenges to Chomsky’s grammar

Chomsky’s grammar gets challenges of two resources. First from disagreement with the organizations of his grammar where syntax is the main point of semantics. Second, disagreement with adequacy of his structural characterization of basic syntactic.

a.       Meaning based grammar

Semantics is given primary role. Because it discussed about literal meaning of sentences, phrases, words and morphemes. Syntax is given only a secondary role, which is to provide a realization of the semantic representation, and then discussed about phrase and sentence structure. Then there is one type of syntactic rule, the transformational grammar which there is no phrase structure rules. And only about syntactic representation, surface structure, and there is no deep structure. Because there is no the meaning of deep structure.