Generative

Pronunciation

• enPR: jÄ•n'É™r-É™-tÄ­v, IPA: /ˈdÊ’enÉ™rÉ™tɪv/

Origin

Compare French génératif.

Full definition of generative

Adjective

1. Having the power of generating, propagating, originating, or producing.
• That generative particle. — Bentley
• 1988, Andrew Radford, Transformational grammar: a first courseOf course, structures like those associated with (36) and (37) constitute only a tiny subset of the infinite set of well-formed sentence structures found in English. We can increase the Generative Capacity of our grammar ( = the set of structures which it generates) either by expanding the Lexicon on the one hand, or by expanding the Categorial Rules (i.e. Phrase Structure Rules) on the other.

Related terms

• degenerative