generative grammar

noun Linguistics.

1. a linguistic theory that attempts to describe the tacit knowledge that a native speaker has of a language by establishing a set of explicit, formalized rules that specify or generate all the possible grammatical sentences of a language, while excluding all unacceptable sentences.Compare transformational grammar.
2. a set of such rules.

noun

1. a description of a language in terms of explicit rules that ideally generate all and only the grammatical sentences of the languageCompare transformational grammar