ABSTRACT
The kind of information contained in a model of what the native speaker knows about the structure of his language, will, therefore be of the same kind, and expressed in the same terminology, as that found in traditional grammars. Grammars as Chomsky conceives from traditional grammars – and this relates to the former being explicitly models of the native speaker's knowledge of the structure of his language – is that they are constructed in such a way as to meet certain formal constraints. Of these, two are particularly important. The first point is that the kind of structural information we have been discussing is what would be traditionally described as 'syntactic'. The second formal condition that a grammar must meet relates the fact that it is intended to be a model of what the native speaker intuitively knows about the structure of his language. Of these the most interesting are those called 'phrase-structure' grammars.
