Richard
Nordquist is a freelance writer and former professor of English and Rhetoric
who wrote college-level Grammar and Composition textbooks.
Updated
February 07, 2019
Transformational
grammar is a theory of grammar that accounts for the constructions
of a language by linguistic transformations and phrase
structures. Also known as transformational-generative grammar or T-G
or TGG.
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).
Observations
- "The
new linguistics, which began in 1957 with the publication of Noam
Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, deserves the label 'revolutionary.'
After 1957, the study of grammar would no longer be limited to what is
said and how it is interpreted. In fact, the word grammar itself
took on a new meaning. The new linguistics defined grammar as our
innate, subconscious ability to generate language, an internal system of
rules that constitutes our human language capacity. The goal of the new
linguistics was to describe this internal grammar.
"Unlike the structuralists, whose goal was to examine the sentences
we actually speak and to describe their systemic nature, the transformationalists
wanted to unlock the secrets of language: to build a model of our internal
rules, a model that would produce all of the grammatical—and no
ungrammatical—sentences." (M. Kolln and R. Funk, Understanding
English Grammar. Allyn and Bacon, 1998)
- "[F]rom
the word go, it has often been clear that Transformational Grammar
was the best available theory of language structure, while lacking any
clear grasp of what distinctive claims the theory made about human
language." (Geoffrey Sampson, Empirical Linguistics.
Continuum, 2001)
Surface Structures and Deep Structures
- "When
it comes to syntax, [Noam] Chomsky is famous for proposing that beneath
every sentence in the mind of a speaker is an invisible, inaudible deep
structure, the interface to the mental lexicon. The deep structure is
converted by transformational rules into a surface structure that corresponds
more closely to what is pronounced and heard. The rationale is that
certain constructions, if they were listed in the mind as surface
structures, would have to be multiplied out in thousands of redundant
variations that would have to have been learned one by one, whereas if the
constructions were listed as deep structures, they would be simple, few in
number, and economically learned." (Steven Pinker, Words and Rules.
Basic Books, 1999)
Transformational Grammar and the Teaching of Writing
- "Though
it is certainly true, as many writers have pointed out, that sentence-combining exercises existed
before the advent of transformational grammar, it should be evident
that the transformational concept of embedding gave sentence combining a theoretical
foundation upon which to build. By the time Chomsky and his followers
moved away from this concept, sentence combining had enough momentum to
sustain itself." (Ronald F. Lunsford, "Modern Grammar and Basic
Writers." Research in Basic Writing: A Bibliographic Sourcebook,
ed. by Michael G. Moran and Martin J. Jacobi. Greenwood Press, 1990)
The Transformation of Transformational Grammar
- "Chomsky
initially justified replacing phrase-structure grammar by arguing that it
was awkward, complex, and incapable of providing adequate accounts of
language. Transformational grammar offered a simple and elegant way
to understand language, and it offered new insights into the underlying
psychological mechanisms.
- "As
the grammar matured, however, it lost its simplicity and much of its
elegance. In addition, transformational grammar has been plagued by
Chomsky's ambivalence and ambiguity regarding meaning. . . . Chomsky
continued to tinker with transformational grammar, changing the theories
and making it more abstract and in many respects more complex, until all
but those with specialized training in linguistics were befuddled. . . .
- "[T]he
tinkering failed to solve most of the problems because Chomsky refused to
abandon the idea of deep structure, which is at the heart of T-G grammar
but which also underlies nearly all of its problems. Such complaints have
fueled the paradigm shift to cognitive grammar." (James D.
Williams, The Teacher's Grammar Book. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999)
- "In
the years since transformational grammar was formulated, it has
gone through a number of changes. In the most recent version, Chomsky
(1995) has eliminated many of the transformational rules in previous
versions of the grammar and replaced them with broader rules, such as a
rule that moves one constituent from one location to another. It was just
this kind of rule on which the trace studies were based. Although newer versions
of the theory differ in several respects from the original, at a deeper
level they share the idea that syntactic structure is at the heart of our
linguistic knowledge. However, this view has been controversial within
linguistics." (David W. Carroll, Psychology of Language, 5th
ed. Thomson Wadsworth, 2008)
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