Dictionary
gen'erative gram'mar
Ling.
1. a linguistic theory that attempts to describe the tacit knowledge that a native speaker has of a language by establishing a set of explicit, formalized rules that specify or generate all the possible grammatical sentences of a language, while excluding all unacceptable sentences. Cf.
transformational grammar.
2. a set of such rules.
Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Copyright © 1997, by Random House, Inc., on Infoplease.