ABSTRACT
Painting in broad-brush strokes, traditional generative grammarians have derived their goals, if not their methods or descriptions, from Chomsky, and for them the distinction of a grammatical sentence from an ungrammatical one has been a central consideration. They have not been interested in probability of occurrence, only in possibility of occurrence. Most of their data have been invented examples and some of these have been hard to envisage in any context. They have, in short, been concerned with the creativity of language. Their models have been designed to account for any sentence, however extraordinary or unlikely, as long as informants have been willing to affirm that the sentence in question is an instance of English.
