Transformational Generative Grammar Definition
Shirley Landrum
In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations (called transformations) to produce new sentences from existing ones.
The method is commonly associated with the American linguist Noam Chomsky's biologically oriented concept of language. But in logical syntax, Rudolf Carnap introduced the term "transformation" in his application of Alfred North Whitehead's and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica. In such a context, the addition of the values of one and two, for example, transform into the value of three; many types of transformation are possible.[1]
Generative algebra was first introduced to general linguistics by the structural linguist Louis Hjelmslev,[2] although the method was described before him by Albert Sechehaye in 1908.[3] Chomsky adopted the concept of transformation from his teacher Zellig Harris, who followed the American descriptivist separation of semantics from syntax. Hjelmslev's structuralist conception including semantics and pragmatics is incorporated into functional grammar.[4]
Transformational analysis is a part of the classical Western grammatical tradition based on the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle and on the grammar of Apollonius Dyscolus. These were joined to establish linguistics as a natural science in the Middle Ages. Transformational analysis was later developed by humanistic grammarians such as Thomas Linacre (1524), Julius Caesar Scaliger (1540), and Sanctius (Francisco Snchez de las Brozas, 1587). The core observation is that grammatical rules alone do not constitute elegance, so learning to use a language correctly requires certain additional effects such as ellipsis. It is more desirable, for example, to say "Maggie and Alex went to the market" than to express the full underlying idea "Maggie went to the market and Alex went to the market". Such phenomena were described in terms of understood elements. In modern terminology, the first expression is the surface structure of the second, and the second expression is the deep structure of the first. The notions of ellipsis and restoration are complementary: the deep structure is converted into the surface structure and restored from it by what were later known as transformational rules.[5]
It was generally agreed that a degree of simplicity improves the quality of speech and writing, but closer inspection of the deep structures of different types of sentences led to many further insights, such as the concept of agent and patient in active and passive sentences. Transformations were given an explanatory role. Sanctius, among others, argued that surface structures pertaining to the choice of grammatical case in certain Latin expressions could not be understood without the restoration of the deep structure. His full transformational system included
Transformational analysis fell out of favor with the rise of historical-comparative linguistics in the 19th century, and the historical linguist Ferdinand de Saussure argued for limiting linguistic analysis to the surface structure.[7] By contrast, Edmund Husserl, in his 1921 elaboration of the 17th-century Port-Royal Grammar, based his version of generative grammar on classical transformations (Modifikationen).[8] Husserl's concept influenced Roman Jakobson, who advocated it in the Prague linguistic circle, which was likewise influenced by Saussure.[9] Based on opposition theory, Jakobson developed his theory of markedness and, having moved to the United States, influenced Noam Chomsky, especially through Morris Halle. Chomsky and his colleagues, including Jerrold Katz and Jerry Fodor, developed what they called transformational generative grammar in the 1960s.[10][11]
The transformational grammar of the 1960s differs from the Renaissance linguistics in its relation to the theory of language. While the humanistic grammarians considered language manmade, Chomsky and his colleagues exploited markedness and transformation theory in their attempt to uncover innate grammar.[12] It would be later clarified that such grammar arises from a brain structure caused by a mutation in humans.[13] In particular, generative linguists tried to reconstruct the underlying innate structure based on deep structure and unmarked forms. Thus, a modern notion of universal grammar, in contrast to the humanistic classics, suggested that the basic word order of biological grammar is unmarked, and unmodified in transformational terms.[14][15]
Transformational generative grammar included two kinds of rules: phrase-structure rules and transformational rules. But scholars abandoned the project in the 1970s. Based on Chomsky's concept of I-language as the proper subject of linguistics as a cognitive science, Katz and Fodor had conducted their research on English grammar employing introspection. These findings could not be generalized cross-linguistically whereby they could not belong to an innate universal grammar.[16]
While Chomsky's 1957 book Syntactic Structures followed Harris's distributionalistic practice of excluding semantics from structural analysis, his 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.[18][19] But these are not quite identical to Hjelmslev's content plane and expression plane.[2] 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. The concept of transformations had been proposed before the development of deep structure to increase the mathematical and descriptive power of context-free grammars. Deep structure was developed largely for technical reasons related to early semantic theory. Chomsky emphasized 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.
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 TG, phrase structure rules generate deep structures. For example, a typical transformation in TG is subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI). That rule takes as its input a declarative sentence with an auxiliary, such as "John has eaten all the heirloom tomatoes", and transforms it into "Has John eaten all the heirloom tomatoes?" In the original formulation (Chomsky 1957), those rules were stated as rules that held over strings of terminals, constituent symbols or both.
In the 1970s, by the time of the Extended Standard Theory, following Joseph Emonds's work on structure preservation, transformations came to be viewed as holding over trees. By the end of government and binding theory, in the late 1980s, transformations were no longer structure-changing operations at all; instead, they add information to already existing trees by copying constituents.
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 a third reordered arguments in the dative alternation. With the shift from rules to principles and constraints in the 1970s, those construction-specific transformations morphed into general rules (all the examples just mentioned are instances of NP movement), which eventually changed into the single general rule move alpha or Move.
Transformations actually come in two types: the post-deep structure kind mentioned above, which are string- or structure-changing, and generalized transformations (GTs). GTs were originally proposed in the earliest forms of generative grammar (such as in 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, but they are still present in tree-adjoining grammar as the Substitution and Adjunction operations, and have recently reemerged in mainstream generative grammar in Minimalism, as the operations Merge and Move.
In generative phonology, another form of transformation is the phonological rule, which describes a mapping between an underlying representation (the phoneme) and the surface form that is articulated during natural speech.[20]
In this context, transformational rules are not strictly necessary to generate the set of grammatical sentences in a language, since that can be done using phrase structure rules alone, but the use of transformations provides economy in some cases (the number of rules can be reduced), and it also provides a way of representing the grammatical relations between sentences, which would not be reflected in a system with phrase structure rules alone.[22]
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