One indication that linguistics has become a mature science is its ability to handle in a formalized manner the problem of ‘grammaticality’, or to define in formal terms the boundary between ‘grammatical’ and ‘ungrammatical’ sentences. A technical formulation of this boundary was one of Noam Chomsky's primary aims in his transformational generative grammar (TGG). We can claim that film theory has reached a relatively mature stage (in comparison with other disciplines in the humanities) thanks in part to attempts to develop a film ‘grammar’ based on Chomsky's early theories of TGG.

David Bordwell has expressed his surprise “that theorists who assign language a key role in determining subjectivity have almost completely ignored the two most important contemporary developments in linguistic theory: Chomsky's Transformational Generative Grammar and his Principles-and-Parameters theory.”