generative grammar

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A linguistic theory that attempts to describe a native speaker's tacit grammatical knowledge by a system of rules that specify all of the well-formed, or grammatical, sentences of a language while excluding all ungrammatical, or impossible, sentences.
• noun A grammar constructed according to this theory.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun (linguistics) a type of grammar that describes syntax in terms of a set of logical rules that can generate all and only the infinite number of grammatical sentences in a language and assigns them all the correct structural description