ABSTRACT
What claims does a formal model make about the relationship between language form and meaning? How does Saussure's theory differ from such claims? To answer these questions, I shall briefly consider the following definition of a generative grammar by the American linguist, Noam Chomsky. This definition serves as a good guide to the kinds of formal models of syntax which predominated in linguistics during the 1960s:
knowledge of a language involves the implicit ability to understand indefinitely many sentences. Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an infinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analysed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.
