ABSTRACT
Formalist theories have approached the study of grammar from the perspective of its structure independently of contextualized meaning and communication. From this same perspective, generative grammar has made a fundamental assumption: that the combinatory power of the language’s units originates its syntactic structure. However, such syntactic-centered conceptions of language, understandably, have not been unanimously accepted. Indeed, it has been argued that the main consequence of the theoretical ascendency of formalist theories has been that phonologic and semantic theorists have systematically ignored grammar in proposing their own independent models ( Jackendoff 2002; Clark, Yallop and Fletcher 2007).
