David!

(seriously) I'm big into him LOL

original source address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txqiwrbYGrs

generative theory

generative theory n
a cover term for a variety of linguistic theories that have the common goals of (a) providing an account of the formal properties of language, positing rules that specify how to form all the grammatical sentences of a language and no ungrammatical ones (the principle of descriptive adequacy), while (b) explaining why grammars have the properties they do and how children come to acquire them in such a short period of time (the principle of explanatory adequacy).
The major versions of generative theory (all associated with the pioneering work of the linguist Noam Chomsky) that have influenced the fields of first and second language acquisition have been:
transformational grammar (also transformational-generative grammar, TG, generative-transformational grammar), and early version of the theory that emphasized the relationships among sentences that can be seen as transforms or transformations of each other, for example the relationships among simple active declarative sentences (e.g., He went to the store), negative sentences (He didn’t go to the store), and questions (Did he go to the store?). such relationships can be accounted for by transformational rules.
the Standard Theory (also Aspects Model) proposed in the mid-1960s, which specified a base component that produces or generates basic syntactic structures called deep structures; a transformational component that changes or transforms those basic structures into sentences called surface structures; a phonological component, which gives sentences a phonetic representation (see GENERATIVE PHONOLOGY) so that they can be pronounced; and a semantic component, which deals with the meaning of sentences (see INTERPRETIVE SEMANTICS).
GOVERNMENT/BINDING THEORY, which dominated formally orientated work in first and second language acquisition during the 1980s and 1990s. MINIMALISM, a version of generative theory developed in the late 1990s.


Jack C. Richards, Richard Schmidt., Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics, p.221