Agustinus Semiun Pengarang

ABSTRACT The generative grammar of Chomsky, then called Transformational Generative Grammar, began to be popular since 1950s. It deals with linguistic rules-called Syntactic Structure to detect how human innately organize the infinite utterances for competence to express meanings during the performance. How Chomsky establishes the rules of utterances during performance is by his syntactic structures that he calls Aspect Model about P-markers and T-markers. Despite of the fact that the UG of Chomsky invites pros and cons dealing with how language is processed since babyhood and how he theorizes based on the linguistic data, the second language acquisition researchers, in fact, have taken advantage of his theory, in terms of how second language is acquired. Chomsky is until now popular because of his power to explain any linguistic uniqueness even-though still many that he is not able to solve linguistic phenomena of the world- What his theory is, and how his theory is unique and that still invite debates and critics, is the concern to present and discuss in this article. Key Words: Generative grammar, critical evaluation, second language acquisition