During the past 25 years a number of fields in the humanities and social sciences have looked to generative linguistics as a model for analyzing the phenomena within their respective domains. Among these fields are those as diverse as anthropology, literary criticism, speech, and rhetoric and compositon. The field of folklore, in particular folk narrative, is no exception to this trend. In fact, attempts to justify the analogizing from linguistics to folklore are not hard to find. For example, Georges states that '. . . the theory and work of generative-transformational grammarians has direct implications for the study of traditional narrative' (1970:14). Indeed, terms and concepts borrowed directly from generative grammar (e.g. generate, grammar, transformation, phrase structure, deep and surface structure, tree diagrams, etc.) have become commonplace in studies of folk narrative. The allure that generative linguistics has for folklorists is summed up by Honko, who states that '. . . the only success-story in the humanities in the recent past [is] modern linguistic theor[y] . . .' (1979-80:6). Unfortunately, however, this analogizing is fraught with basic misconceptions, which all too often render the particular application of linguistic theory to the study of folk narrative either confusing or misleading (at best) or devoid of content (at worst). Therefore, our purpose here will be, first, to examine some of the basic misapplications of generative linguistic theory and, second, to try to point out analogies between linguistics and folklore which may turn out to be useful.'