Question

The capacity of a grammar to generate a proper structural description of sentence is called:

• A. Weak generative capacity
• B. Strong generative capacity
• C. Neutral generative capacity
• D. None of the above

Answer 1

Answer:

B. Strong generative capacity

• Strong generative capacity refers to a grammar’s ability to generate not just the strings (sentences) of a language, but also their structural descriptions—such as phrase structure trees or syntactic analyses.

• In contrast, weak generative capacity only concerns itself with generating the correct set of strings (i.e., the surface forms of sentences) without any structural information.