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Article published In: Asian Languages and Linguistics
Vol. 6:2 (2025) ► pp.321–352

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The generative grammar theory and studies on Altaic languages

 | Minzu University of China
Published online: 29 January 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/alal.25005.toh
Abstract
It has been a long tradition that all functional categories of Altaic languages are treated as morphological element of content words and recognized as grammatical categories of a noun or a verb. Such an approach of blindly imitating the framework of inflectional Indo-European languages’ grammar wiped out all the referable idiosyncratic meanings of the Altaic agglutinative functional constituents developed through the long process of grammaticalization. As a result, the studies of the Altaic languages’ grammar were led into dead end, and the scholars in the field couldn’t able to interpret even the simplest syntactic structures. Thanks to the cognitive revolution launched by Chomsky in the linguistic field. Due to the enlightenment of his Generative Grammar theory, we have had now a second chance of reviewing the Altaic languages and taken a satisfactory step toward the adequacy of observation, description and interpretation. By recalling his breakthrough achievements over the past 30 years, the author of this paper attributes his accomplishments to the two major breaking points: first, being able to get rid of the grammatical framework of the inflectional languages, and second, identifying the head status of functional constituents in the Altaic languages.
Article outline
  • 1.An introduction
  • 2.Getting rid of the grammatical framework of the inflectional languages
  • 3.Recognizing the syntactic head status of the functional components
    • 3.1Principles and conditions related to biology
    • 3.2Functional categories as syntactic heads
      • 3.2.1The plural suffixes, possessive suffixes, and case suffixes
        • 3.2.1.1Plural suffixes and their syntactic function
        • 3.2.1.2Possessive suffixes and their syntactic function
        • 3.2.1.3Case suffixes and their syntactic function
      • 3.2.2The voice suffixes, aspect suffixes, negation suffixes and their syntactic functions
        • 3.2.2.1Voice suffixes and their syntactic function
        • 3.2.2.2Aspect suffixes and their syntactic function
        • 3.2.2.3Negation suffixes and their syntactic function
      • 3.2.3The substativization suffixes and their syntactic function
      • 3.2.4Tense suffixes and their syntactic function
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (48)
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