Complete list of Transformational Grammar rules...
John Smith
Grammar rules as applied to English. The ones I have come across have all
been obviously imcomplete. I hope I am using the right terminology here.
For example, something like the following:
S -> NP + VP
NP -> (DET) + N
.
.
.
Thanks again,
John Smith
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John Lawler
>Can anyone point me to a complete, or semi-complete, set of Transformational
>Grammar rules as applied to English. The ones I have come across have all
>been obviously imcomplete. I hope I am using the right terminology here.
>For example, something like the following:
>S -> NP + VP
>NP -> (DET) + N
>.
>.
>.
Those aren't transformation rules. Those are phrase structure rules.
Different thing entirely; they are essentially a Post production system
and specify the well-formedness conditions for phrase structures.
Transformations, by contrast, change one phrase structure into another, and
have names, like Passive, Subject-Raising, Tough-Movement, Slifting,
Extraposition, Equi-NP-Deletion, There-Insertion, or Sluicing, to name only
a few.
You can get a pretty decent list of one kind of transformations (cyclic
verb-governed alternations) in Beth Levin's book "English Verb Classes and
Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation", University of Chicago Press
1993.
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler Michigan Linguistics
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John Smith
"John Lawler" <jla...@asteroids.gpcc.itd.umich.edu> wrote in message
news:4qvqc.254$j9....@news.itd.umich.edu...
John Smith
"John Lawler" <jla...@asteroids.gpcc.itd.umich.edu> wrote in message
news:4qvqc.254$j9....@news.itd.umich.edu...
>
> >Can anyone point me to a complete, or semi-complete, set of
Transformational
> >Grammar rules as applied to English. The ones I have come across have all
> >been obviously imcomplete. I hope I am using the right terminology here.
>
> >For example, something like the following:
>
> >S -> NP + VP
> >NP -> (DET) + N
> >.
> >.
> >.
>
> Those aren't transformation rules. Those are phrase structure rules.
> Different thing entirely; they are essentially a Post production system
> and specify the well-formedness conditions for phrase structures.
Thanks for the correction. How about a complete list of phrase structure
rules applied to English?
Cece
How about a complete list of the different types of grammar?
Including what they're for, and they are (mis)applied. I mean, some
of these are of use to linguists who are figuring out how the language
has evolved, yes? but of no use to someone who is trying to figure out
how to use the language, yet they are taught to small children and to
adults learning English as a second language. Or at least, small
unrelated bits are, mixed with small unrelated bits of other types.
In the '50s, I was taught a descriptive grammar (I don't know its
official name), with parts of speech and clauses and phrases,
diagramming sentences (which has come in useful since), proper
punctuation, principle parts of verbs, mood, all that sort of thing.
In the late '60s, diagramming was gone, and children were taught to
draw big circumflexes above the sentence, these supposedly showing how
the words related to each other -- but if the sentence was at all
complex, the lines would have to overlap, including chunks that didn't
belong.
Pogo
Evan Kirshenbaum
> Thanks for the correction. How about a complete list of phrase
> structure rules applied to English?
There really is no such thing. The formalism isn't up to it. For a
practical approximation, I seem to recall that Pereira and Shieber's
_Prolog and Natural-Language Analysis_ built up a pretty good set.
Bresnan and Kaplan's Lexical Functional Grammar used annotated phrase
structure rules. You might take a look at one of those books,
although the early ones (the only ones available when I took her
course in the mid '80s) tended to cover narrow treatments of phenomena
in lots of languages rather than a comprehensive attempt to do any one
language.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
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