Generative linguistics

One of the major contributions which Chomsky [Cho65][Cho57] made to the field of theoretical linguistics was the establishment of a methodological framework for the study of language. There were several tenets to this approach, either explicitly or implicitly:

1. The aim is to define symbolic rules and structures which characterise what constitutes a sentence of a language and what does not.
2. These descriptions should be sufficiently precise and detailed that there is no doubt about what they predict, to the extent that it would in principle be possible to check the predictions mechanically (e.g. using a computer).
3. These symbolic accounts can be empirical without large scale collection of data or statistical studies. The linguist compares what sentences are known to exist in the language with those predicted by the rules. Often, falsification of a proposed set of rules can be achieved from a relatively small set of examples.
4. The rules should capture regularities in the data. That is, sentences which have some inherent similarity (syntactically, semantically, etc.) should be described in a similar way by the rules, and systematic alterations to the symbolic descriptions should correspond to systematic changes in the language phenomena being described.

We have to a large extent adopted these attitudes in our study of riddles, as have various other humour researchers (some tacitly). We have attempted to devise abstract symbolic accounts of the detailed mechanisms underlying our chosen set of phenomena (certain types of punning riddle), we have defined these rules precisely (as shown by the computer implementation), and we believe that they show regularities in exactly the way that linguists expect grammars to display generalisations about sentences.