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51 CHOMSKY’S INFLUENCE
red foxes attack furiously (and, significantly, different from Furiously sleep ideas
green colourless, which the grammar should not generate)? If so, its oddness
must be due to some semantic or pragmatic compatibility problems which are
not part of the syntax. Alternatively, should the grammar specify that sleep is
not compatible with furiously and that abstract nouns cannot be modified by
colour adjectives (although, having said that, I have seen the expression green
ideas in use, where green meant ‘ecologically sound’)? In 1957 Chomsky was
clear that the grammar would and should generate this sentence, despite its
superficial oddity. McCawley (1971: 219) supports this view, claiming that ‘A
person who utters [My toothbrush is alive and is trying to kill me] should be
referred to a psychiatric clinic, not to a remedial English course.’ Despite such
problems, the explicitness of Chomskyan grammar is one of its great strengths.
It has led to computational approaches to linguistics in which (partial) grammars
are tested by implementing them on computer, and such approaches have
implications for the eventual use of natural languages by computer systems.
The second thing to notice is that although the rules in linguistics are usually
stated as operations which look as though they are instructions to produce a particular
string, in principle they are neutral between the speaker and the listener,
merely stating that the string in question does or does not have a coherent parse.
Grammaticality and acceptability
In principle, something is grammatical if it is generated by the grammar, and
ungrammatical if it is not. Since we do not have complete generative grammars
of English (or any other language) easily available, this is generally interpreted
as meaning that a string is grammatical if some linguist believes it should be
generated by the grammar, and ungrammatical otherwise. Given what was said
above, it should be clear that there is a distinction to be drawn between strings
which are grammatical and those which are acceptable, that is, judged by
native speakers to be part of their language. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
is possibly grammatical, but may not be acceptable in English (though poems
have been written using the string). There’s lots of people here today is certainly
acceptable, but it might not be grammatical if the grammar in question requires
the verb to agree with the lots (compare Lots of people are/*is here today).
Although the asterisk is conventionally used to mark ungrammatical sequences
(this generalises on its meaning in historical linguistics, where it indicates
‘unattested’), it is sometimes used to mark unacceptable ones.
Deep structure and surface structure
Chomsky (1957) argues that context-free phrase structure rules (see section 6)
are not sufficient to generate natural languages. This claim has been vigorously