Abstract
Generative grammar, proposed and developed by Chomsky in 20th century, aimed to describe human’s possibly genetic faculty of aquiring and using languages. Recent advancements of generative grammer, such as X-bar theory and minimalist program, seem to suggest that the essential portion of the generative grammatical theories might be applicable to other general systems, especially to biosystems. In this paper, phrase-structure-like structure and its possible (grammatical) rules were searched, listed, and analyzed by making comparison with language phrase-structure systems. Head-modifier phrase-like structures were wisdely observed in various biosystems, from molecular level to social and cultural levels. A considerable portion of such systems are very like the phrase structure systems found in the X-bar and/or Minimalist models of the generative grammar in human language systems. Origins of hierarchical societies and therefrom derived upper-leveled bioindividuals (superorganisms) (such as bee-superorganism and multi-cellular animals) or upper-leveled biomachine (such as protein-synthesizing machine) were discussed in detail from the aspects of generalided phrase-structure grammar and active (or autopoietic) evolution. Various phrase-structure-generating biosystems seem to be some kinds of cognitive biomachine, represented by hierarchical learning neural network machine. Accordingly, a possible proposal of "Generalized phrase-structure grammar" or "Generalized generative grammar" would mean that some essential underlying rules must be common to both language systems and other biosystems. Interdisciplinary research problems in these area were discussed.
