generative grammar

American  

noun

Linguistics.

1. a linguistic theory that attempts to describe the tacit knowledge that a native speaker has of a language by establishing a set of explicit, formalized rules that specify or generate all the possible grammatical sentences of a language, while excluding all unacceptable sentences.

2. a set of such rules.

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generative grammar British  

noun

1. a description of a language in terms of explicit rules that ideally generate all and only the grammatical sentences of the language Compare transformational grammar

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Etymology

Origin of generative grammar

First recorded in 1955–60