Syntax : Transformational generative grammar development

Transformational generative grammar development

A. Transformational grammar

Transformational grammar is a theory of grammar that accounts for the constructions of a language by linguistic transformations and phrase structures. Transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is, in the study of linguistics, part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of naturally evolved languages, that considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words which form grammatical sentences in a given language. Transformational Grammar involves the use of defined operations called transformations to produce new sentences from existing ones.

Following the publication of Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures in 1957, transformational grammar dominated the field of linguistics for the next few decades. "The era of Transformational-Generative Grammar, as it is called, signifies a sharp break with the linguistic tradition of the first half of the [twentieth] century both in Europe and America because, having as its principal objective the formulation of a finite set of basic and transformational rules that explain how the native speaker of a language can generate and comprehend all its possible grammatical sentences, it focuses mostly on syntax and not on phonology or morphology, as structuralism does" (Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 2005).

TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE GRAMMAR, short form TG. In theoretical LINGUISTICS, a type of generative grammar first advocated by Noam CHOMSKY in Syntactic Structures (1957). Since then, there have been many changes in the descriptive apparatus of TG. Common to all versions is the view that some rules are transformational: that is, they change one structure into another according to such prescribed conventions as moving, inserting, deleting, and replacing items. From an early stage of its history, TG has stipulated two levels of syntactic structure: deep structure (an abstract underlying structure that incorporates all the syntactic information required for the interpretation of a given sentence) and surface structure (a structure that incorporates all the syntactic features of a sentence required to convert the sentence into a spoken or written version).

Transformations link deep with surface structure. A typical transformation is the rule for forming questions, which requires that the normal subject—verb order is inverted so that the surface structure of Can I see you later? differs in order of elements from that of I can see you later. The theory postulates that the two sentence s have the same order in deep structure, but the question transformation changes the order to that in surface structure. Sentences that are syntactically ambiguous have the same surface structures but different deep structures: for example, the sentence Visiting relatives can be a nuisance is ambiguous in that the subject Visiting relatives may correspond to To visit relatives or to Relatives that visit. The ambiguity is dissolved if the modal verb can is omitted, since the clausal subject requires a singular verb (Visiting relatives is a nuisance), whereas the phrasal subject requires the plural (Visiting relatives are a nuisance).

1. Transformations

The usual usage of the term 'transformation' in linguistics refers to a rule that takes an input typically called the Deep Structure (in the Standard Theory) or D-structure (in the extended standard theory or government and binding theory) and changes it in some restricted way to result in a Surface Structure (or S-structure). In TGG, Deep structures were generated by a set of phrase structure rules.

The earliest conceptions of transformations were that they were construction-specific devices. For example, there was a transformation that turned active sentences into passive ones. A different transformation raised embedded subjects into main clause subject position in sentences such as "John seems to have gone"; and yet a third reordered arguments in the dative alternation. With the shift from rules to principles and constraints that was found in the 1970s, these construction-specific transformations morphed into general rules (all the examples just mentioned being instances of NP movement), which eventually changed into the single general rule of move alpha or Move.

Transformations actually come in two types: (i) the post-Deep structure kind mentioned above, which are string or structure changing, and (ii) Generalized Transformations (GTs). Generalized transformations were originally proposed in the earliest forms of generative grammar (e.g., Chomsky 1957). They take small structures, either atomic or generated by other rules, and combine them. For example, the generalized transformation of embedding would take the kernel "Dave said X" and the kernel "Dan likes smoking" and combine them into "Dave said Dan likes smoking." GTs are thus structure building rather than structure changing. In the Extended Standard Theory and government and binding theory, GTs were abandoned in favor of recursive phrase structure rules.

2. Deep structure and surface structure

The deep structure of a linguistic expression is a theoritical construct that seeks to unify several related structures. For example, the sentences “Pat loves chris “ and Chris loved by Pat “ mean roughly the same thing and use similar words. Some linguists, in particular Noam chomsky, have tried to account for this similarity by positing that these two sentences are distinct surface forms that derive from a common deep structure.

In early transformational syntax, deep structures are derivation trees of a context free language. These trees are then transformed by a sequence of tree rewriting operation (transformation) into surface structures. It is tempting to regard deep structures as representing meanings and surface structures as representing sentences expressing those meanings, but this is not the concept of deep structure favoured by chomsky.

Noam Chomsky’s 1965 book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax developed the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure represents the core semantic relations of a sentence, and is mapped onto the surface structure (which follows the phonological form of the sentence very closely) via transformations. Chomsky believed there are considerable similarities between languages' deep structures and that these reveal properties, common to all languages, that surface structures conceal. However, this may not have been the central motivation for introducing deep structure; transformations had been proposed prior to the development of deep structure as a means of increasing the mathematical and descriptive power of context-free grammars. Similarly, deep structure was devised largely for technical reasons relating to early semantic theory. Chomsky emphasizes the importance of modern formal mathematical devices in the development of grammatical theory.

But the fundamental reason for [the] inadequacy of traditional grammars is a more technical one. Although it was well understood that linguistic processes are in some sense "creative," the technical devices for expressing a system of recursive processes were simply not available until much more recently. In fact, a real understanding of how a language can (in Humboldt's words) "make infinite use of finite means" has developed only within the last thirty years, in the course of studies in the foundations of mathematics.

3. Grammatical theories

In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relevant to the construction and evaluation of grammatical theories. The first was the distinction between competence and performance. Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors (e.g., starting a sentence and then abandoning it midway through). He argued that these errors in linguistic performance were irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence (the knowledge that allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences). Consequently, the linguist can study an idealised version of language, greatly simplifying linguistic analysis (see the "Grammaticality" section below).

The second idea related directly to the evaluation of theories of grammar. Chomsky distinguished between grammars that achieve descriptive adequacy and those that go further and achieved explanatory adequacy. A descriptively adequate grammar for a particular language defines the (infinite) set of grammatical sentences in that language; that is, it describes the language in its entirety. A grammar that achieves explanatory adequacy has the additional property that it gives an insight into the underlying linguistic structures in the human mind; that is, it does not merely describe the grammar of a language, but makes predictions about how linguistic knowledge is mentally represented.

For Chomsky, the nature of such mental representations is largely innate, so if a grammatical theory has explanatory adequacy it must be able to explain the various grammatical nuances of the languages of the world as relatively minor variations in the universal pattern of human language. Chomsky argued that, even though linguists were still a long way from constructing descriptively adequate grammars, progress in terms of descriptive adequacy will only come if linguists hold explanatory adequacy as their goal. In other words, real insight into the structure of individual languages can only be gained through comparative study of a wide range of languages, on the assumption that they are all cut from the same cloth.

4. Phrase structure rules

Phrase structure rules are a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language's syntax and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, being first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957. They are used to break down a natural language sentence into its constituent parts, also known as syntactic categories, including both lexical categories (parts of speech) and phrasal categories. A grammar that uses phrase structure rules is a type of phrase structure grammar. Phrase structure rules as they are commonly employed operate according to the constituency relation, and a grammar that employs phrase structure rules is therefore a constituency grammar; as such, it stands in contrast to dependency grammars, which are based on the dependency relation.

Phrase structure rules are a way to describe a given language’s syntax. Phrase structure rules were commonly used in tranformational grammar (TGG), although they were not an invention of TGG rather, early TGG’s added to phrase structure rules ( the most obvious example being transformations, see the development of TGG.