Difference between generativists and structuralist in english language
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I will take a broad approach to it. First some terms. By “Structural Linguistics” I take you to mean the Structuralist tradition that arose out of Saussure, the Prague Circle, and the Americanist anthropologists. By “Generative Linguistics” I take you to mean the Generative/UG tradition that arose out of Chomsky, the Optimality Theorists, and formal semanticists. Numerous differences can be ascertained, but the biggest one is that Structuralism is a theory about language, while Generativism is a theory about people. For Structuralists, a language (une langue in Saussure’s term) can be seen as a system (un système où tout se tient, as Saussure put it). The parts of the system work against one another, and can be put into various classes as a result. For instance, the difference between parle and parlait in French is one of tense (and aspect), but we put -e and -ait in the same class because of their structural relationships: They share being suffixes attached to verbs and expressing 3rd person singular subjects. Their opposition involves tense/aspect; one is present, one is imperfective past. Likewise, we put -ait and -ions in a class, because they express imperfective past, but they are opposed by expressing 3rd singular and 1st plural subjects. A key development of Structuralists like Trubetzkoy or Jakobson was to apply this concept to the forms themselves. Phonemes are classes of sounds (allophones) that the language lumps together. Two sounds can be in the same class in one language, but in different classes in another. Americanists developed the empirical test of the minimal pair to determine most clearly whether sounds are in the same class or not: If you can find two forms that are identical except the sounds you’re testing, and speakers assign different meanings to those forms, then the sounds are in distinct classes in that language. For example, in English, vest and best are distinct ‘words’, so we can tell that /b/ and /v/ are distinctive sounds in the English language system. So what kind of “thing” is this system? What is a language? Saussure proposed that the language system (the langue) sort of existed outside of our consciousness, and we could each access it to varying extents. In essence, the language system is a social object. Saussure directly compared systems of this sort to systems of customs like table manners. So is there such a thing as a language? Saussure’s idea of a language as an object in the ether makes no psychological sense (and didn’t then). But we can kinda tell what he was getting at. It’s difficult to talk about language as a ‘thing’, because it exists as a system. You can compare what the noun language describes to other things like an outfit. If you have 5 pairs of pants and 5 shirts, you can make 25 outfits. But what is this “thing” called outfit? Where does it ‘exist’? It’s hard to pin that down, because the outfit is a system, and comes into existence through the relationships between the pants and the shirt. The same goes with a langue.
Generativists adopt a lot of the structuralist notions of system, but their goal is distinct: Not merely to understand linguistic systems, but to use linguistic systems to understand how human minds work and develop. So the generativist asks questions like “What does a speaker know?” and “How does the speaker come to know it?”
Structuralist is applied to indicate the individual and things which are correlated with structuralism. In sociology, structuralism is the manner which mentions components of social culture which must be assumed by means of their connection to a wider, overarching arrangement or composition. It works to reveal the arrangements that hold all the things that individuals perform such as imagine, observe, and believe.
Linguists who comprehend the generative method described as generativists. The generative institution has concentrated on the study of language and discussed other perspectives of a language's composition, including its morphology and linguistics.