Syntactic rules: this means we must account for all the grammatically correct phrases and sentences and only those grammatically correct phrases and sentences in whatever language we are analyzing.
=> if we write rules for the creation of well- formed structures, we have to check that those rules, when applied logically, won’t also lead to ill-formed structures.
Examples:
Correct: "The cat (S) chased (V) the mouse (O)."
Incorrect: "The cat the mouse chased."
A Generative Grammar : a set of rules defining the possible sentences in a language. [ define the set of rules or principles that can generate all possible grammatical sentences in a language ]
=> It can be used to “generate” or produce sentence structures and not just describe them.