Editing Transformational grammar (section)

===Grammaticality===
{{Further|Grammaticality}}

Chomsky argued that "grammatical" and "ungrammatical" can be meaningfully and usefully defined. In contrast, an extreme behaviorist linguist would argue that language can be studied only through recordings or transcriptions of actual speech and that the role of the linguist is to look for patterns in such observed speech, not to hypothesize about why such patterns might occur or to label particular utterances grammatical or ungrammatical. Few linguists in the 1950s actually took such an extreme position, but Chomsky was on the opposite extreme, defining grammaticality in an unusually [[mentalism (psychology)|mentalistic]] way for the time.<ref>{{cite book|author=Newmeyer, Frederick J.|title=Linguistic Theory in America|publisher=Academic Press|year=1986|edition=Second}}{{page needed|date=November 2013}}</ref> He argued that the intuition of a [[native speaker]] is enough to define the grammaticality of a sentence; that is, if a particular string of English words elicits a double-take or a feeling of wrongness in a native English speaker, with various extraneous factors affecting intuitions controlled for, it can be said that the string of words is ungrammatical. That, according to Chomsky, is entirely distinct from the question of whether a sentence is meaningful or can be understood. It is possible for a sentence to be both grammatical and meaningless, as in Chomsky's famous example, "[[colorless green ideas sleep furiously]]".<ref>Chomsky 1957:15</ref> But such sentences manifest a linguistic problem that is distinct from that posed by meaningful but ungrammatical (non)-sentences such as "man the bit sandwich the", the meaning of which is fairly clear, but which no [[native speaker]] would accept as well-formed.