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In
linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of
generative grammar Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...
, especially of
natural languages In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. 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 American linguist
Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
. Generative algebra was first introduced to general linguistics by the structural linguist
Louis Hjelmslev Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (; 3 October 189930 May 1965) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family (his father was the mathematician Johannes Hjelmslev), Hjelmslev studied ...
although the method was described before him by
Albert Sechehaye Albert Sechehaye (; 4 July 1870, Geneva – 2 July 1946, Geneva) was a Swiss linguist. He is known for editing Ferdinand de Saussure's lectures, ''Course in General Linguistics''. Biography Sechehaye studied at the University of Geneva under Ferd ...
in 1908. Chomsky adopted the concept of transformations from his teacher
Zellig Harris Zellig Sabbettai Harris (; October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and dis ...
, who followed the American descriptivist separation of semantics from syntax. Hjelmslev's structuralist conception including semantics and
pragmatics In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...
is incorporated into functional grammar.


Historical context

Transformational analysis is a part of the classical Western grammatical tradition based on the
metaphysics Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...
of
Plato Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
and
Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of phil ...
and on the grammar of
Apollonius Dyscolus Apollonius Dyscolus ( el, Ἀπολλώνιος ὁ Δύσκολος; reached his maturity sometime around 130 CE) is considered one of the greatest of the Greek grammarians. Life Little is known of Apollonius Dyscolus, other than that he ...
. These were joined to establish linguistics as a natural science in the
Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...
. Transformational analysis was later developed by
humanistic Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings. It considers human beings the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry. The meaning of the term "humani ...
grammarians such as
Thomas Linacre Thomas Linacre or Lynaker ( ; 20 October 1524) was an English humanist scholar and physician, after whom Linacre College, Oxford, and Linacre House, a boys' boarding house at The King's School, Canterbury, are named. Linacre was more of a schola ...
(1524),
Julius Caesar Scaliger Julius Caesar Scaliger (; April 23, 1484 – October 21, 1558), or Giulio Cesare della Scala, was an Italian scholar and physician, who spent a major part of his career in France. He employed the techniques and discoveries of Renaissance humanism ...
(1540), and Sanctius (
Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas (1523–1600), also known as El Brocense, and in Latin as Franciscus Sanctius Brocensis, was a Spanish philologist and humanist. Biography Sanctius was born in Brozas, province of Cáceres. His parents, Fr ...
, 1587). The core observation is that grammatical rules alone do not constitute
elegance Elegance is beauty that shows unusual effectiveness and simplicity. Elegance is frequently used as a standard of tastefulness, particularly in visual design, decorative arts, literature, science, and the aesthetics of mathematics. Elegant t ...
, so learning to use a language correctly requires certain additional effects such as
ellipsis The ellipsis (, also known informally as dot dot dot) is a series of dots that indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. The plural is ellipses. The term origin ...
. 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 was later known as transformational rules. 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 Agent may refer to: Espionage, investigation, and law *, spies or intelligence officers * Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another ** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...
and
patient A patient is any recipient of health care services that are performed by healthcare professionals. The patient is most often ill or injured and in need of treatment by a physician, nurse, optometrist, dentist, veterinarian, or other health c ...
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 A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In vari ...
in certain Latin expressions could not be understood without the restoration of the deep structure. His full transformational system included # ellipsis, the deletion of understood
semantic Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
or
syntactic In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), ...
elements; # pleonasm, the occurrence of syntactically superfluous elements; # syllepsis, the violation of a rule of
agreement Agreement may refer to: Agreements between people and organizations * Gentlemen's agreement, not enforceable by law * Trade agreement, between countries * Consensus, a decision-making process * Contract, enforceable in a court of law ** Meeting o ...
; # hyperbaton, the violation of normal word order. Transformational analysis fell out of favor with the rise of
historical-comparative linguistics Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: # to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages # ...
in the 19th century, and the historical linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure Ferdinand de Saussure (; ; 26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widel ...
argued for limiting linguistic analysis to the surface structure. By contrast,
Edmund Husserl , thesis1_title = Beiträge zur Variationsrechnung (Contributions to the Calculus of Variations) , thesis1_url = https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:58535/bdef:Book/view , thesis1_year = 1883 , thesis2_title ...
, in his 1921 elaboration of the 17th-century
Port-Royal Grammar The ''Port-Royal Grammar'' (originally ''Grammaire générale et raisonnée contenant les fondemens de l'art de parler, expliqués d'une manière claire et naturelle'', "General and Rational Grammar, containing the fundamentals of the art of speaki ...
, based his version of
generative grammar Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...
on classical transformations (''Modifikationen''). Husserl's concept influenced
Roman Jakobson Roman Osipovich Jakobson (russian: Рома́н О́сипович Якобсо́н; October 11, 1896Kucera, Henry. 1983. "Roman Jakobson." ''Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America'' 59(4): 871–883. – July 18,Prague linguistic circle The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and ...
, which was likewise influenced by Saussure. Based on
opposition theory A binary opposition (also binary system) is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one ...
, Jakobson developed his theory of
markedness In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant defau ...
and, having moved to the United States, influenced
Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
, especially through
Morris Halle Morris Halle (; July 23, 1923 – April 2, 2018) was a Latvian-American, Latvian-born Jewish United States, American Linguistics, linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute ...
. Chomsky and his colleagues, including
Jerrold Katz Jerrold Jacob Katz (14 July 19327 February 2002) was an American philosopher and linguist. Biography After receiving a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, Katz became a Research Associate in Linguistics at the Massachusetts Ins ...
and
Jerry Fodor Jerry Alan Fodor (; April 22, 1935 – November 29, 2017) was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modu ...
, developed what they called transformational generative grammar in the 1960s. The transformational grammar of the 1960s differs from the Renaissance linguistics in its relation to the
theory of language Theory of language is a topic from Philosophy of language#Nature of language, philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. It has the goal of answering the questions "What is language?"; "Why do languages have the properties they have?"; or ...
. While the humanistic grammarians considered language manmade, Chomsky and his colleagues exploited markedness and transformation theory in their attempt to uncover
innate grammar Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible hum ...
. It would be later clarified that such grammar arises from a brain structure caused by a
mutation In biology, a mutation is an alteration in the nucleic acid sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA. Viral genomes contain either DNA or RNA. Mutations result from errors during DNA or viral replication, mi ...
in humans. 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 Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible hum ...
, in contrast to the humanistic classics, suggested that the basic word order of ''biological grammar'' is unmarked and unmodified in transformational terms. 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 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 combi ...
as the proper subject of linguistics as a cognitive science, Katz and Fodor had conducted their research on English grammar employing
introspection Introspection is the examination of one's own conscious thoughts and feelings. In psychology, the process of introspection relies on the observation of one's mental state, while in a spiritual context it may refer to the examination of one's s ...
. Their findings could not be universalized cross-linguistically whereby they could not belong to an innate universal grammar. The concept of transformation was nevertheless not fully rejected. In Chomsky's 1990s
Minimalist Program In linguistics, the minimalist program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky. Following Imre Lakatos's distinction, Chomsky presents minima ...
, transformations pertain to the
lexicon A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Koine Greek language, Greek word (), neuter of () ...
and the move operation. This more lenient approach offers more prospects of universalizability. It is, for example, argued that the English SVO word-order ( subject,
verb A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
,
object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an ...
) represents the initial state of the cognitive
language faculty The language module or language faculty is a hypothetical structure in the human brain which is thought to contain innate capacities for language, originally posited by Noam Chomsky. There is ongoing research into brain modularity in the fields o ...
. However, in languages like
Classical Arabic Classical Arabic ( ar, links=no, ٱلْعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ, al-ʿarabīyah al-fuṣḥā) or Quranic Arabic is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notab ...
, which has a basic VSO order, sentences are automatically transformed by the move operation from the underlying SVO order on which the matrix of all sentences in all languages is reconstructed. Therefore, there is no longer a need for a separate surface and deep matrix and additional rules of conversion between the two levels. According to Chomsky, this solution allows sufficient descriptive and explanatory adequacy—descriptive because all languages are analyzed on the same matrix, and explanatory because the analysis shows in which particular way the sentence is derived from the (hypothesized) initial cognitive state.


Basic mechanisms


Deep structure and surface structure

While
Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
'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 Aspect or Aspects may refer to: Entertainment * ''Aspect magazine'', a biannual DVD magazine showcasing new media art * Aspect Co., a Japanese video game company * Aspects (band), a hip hop group from Bristol, England * ''Aspects'' (Benny Carter ...
'' developed the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation: a deep structure and a surface structure.The
Port-Royal Grammar The ''Port-Royal Grammar'' (originally ''Grammaire générale et raisonnée contenant les fondemens de l'art de parler, expliqués d'une manière claire et naturelle'', "General and Rational Grammar, containing the fundamentals of the art of speaki ...
of 1660 identified similar principles;
But these are not quite identical to Hjelmslev's content plane and expression plane. The deep structure represents the core
semantic relations Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
of a sentence and is mapped onto the surface structure, which follows the
phonological Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
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 grammar In formal language theory, a context-free grammar (CFG) is a formal grammar whose production rules are of the form :A\ \to\ \alpha with A a ''single'' nonterminal symbol, and \alpha a string of terminals and/or nonterminals (\alpha can be empt ...
s. 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:


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 A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a ...
), and changes it in some restricted way to result in a surface structure (or S-structure). In TG,
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, proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957. They are used to break down a natural lang ...
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. :X NP AUX Y \Rightarrow X AUX NP Y (NP = Noun Phrase and AUX = Auxiliary) 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 A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a ...
, GTs were abandoned in favor of recursive phrase structure rules, but they are still present in
tree-adjoining grammar Tree-adjoining grammar (TAG) is a grammar formalism defined by Aravind Joshi. Tree-adjoining grammars are somewhat similar to context-free grammars, but the elementary unit of rewriting is the tree rather than the symbol. Whereas context-free gram ...
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 Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
, another form of transformation is the
phonological rule A phonological rule is a formal way of expressing a systematic phonological or morphophonological process or diachronic sound change in language. Phonological rules are commonly used in generative phonology as a notation to capture sound-related o ...
, which describes a mapping between an
underlying representation In some models of phonology as well as morphophonology in the field of linguistics, the underlying representation (UR) or underlying form (UF) of a word or morpheme is the abstract form that a word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phono ...
(the
phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
) and the surface form that is articulated during
natural speech In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has linguistic evolution, evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditati ...
.


Formal definition

Chomsky's advisor,
Zellig Harris Zellig Sabbettai Harris (; October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and dis ...
, took transformations to be relations between sentences such as "I finally met this talkshow host you always detested" and simpler (kernel) sentences "I finally met this talkshow host" and "You always detested this talkshow host." A transformational-generative (or simply transformational) grammar thus involved two types of productive rules:
phrase structure rule 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, proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957. They are used to break down a natural lang ...
s, such as "S → NP VP" (a sentence may consist of a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase) etc., which could be used to generate grammatical sentences with associated parse trees (phrase markers, or P markers); and transformational rules, such as rules for converting statements to
questions A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammar, grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are inte ...
or active to
passive voice A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the ''theme'' or ''patient'' of the main verb – that is, the person or thing t ...
, which acted on the phrase markers to produce other grammatically correct sentences. Hjelmslev had called word-order conversion rules "permutations". 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. This notion of transformation proved adequate for subsequent versions, including the "extended", "revised extended", and Government-Binding (GB) versions of generative grammar, but it may no longer be sufficient for
minimalist grammar Minimalist grammars are a class of formal grammars that aim to provide a more rigorous, usually proof-theoretic, formalization of Chomskyan Minimalist program than is normally provided in the mainstream Minimalist literature. A variety of particula ...
, as
merge Merge, merging, or merger may refer to: Concepts * Merge (traffic), the reduction of the number of lanes on a road * Merge (linguistics), a basic syntactic operation in generative syntax in the Minimalist Program * Merger (politics), the comb ...
may require a formal definition that goes beyond the tree manipulation characteristic of
Move α '' Move α'' is a feature of the Revised Extended Standard Theory (REST) of transformational grammar developed by Noam Chomsky in the late 1970s. The term refers to the relation between an indexed constituent and its trace ''t'', e.g., the relati ...
.


Mathematical representation

An important feature of all transformational grammars is that they are more powerful than
context-free grammar In formal language theory, a context-free grammar (CFG) is a formal grammar whose production rules are of the form :A\ \to\ \alpha with A a ''single'' nonterminal symbol, and \alpha a string of terminals and/or nonterminals (\alpha can be empt ...
s. Chomsky formalized this idea in the
Chomsky hierarchy In formal language theory, computer science and linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy (also referred to as the Chomsky–Schützenberger hierarchy) is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars. This hierarchy of grammars was described by ...
. He argued that it is impossible to describe the structure of natural languages with context-free grammars. His general position on the non-context-freeness of natural language has held up since then, though his specific examples of the inadequacy of CFGs in terms of their weak generative capacity were disproved.


Core concepts


Innate linguistic knowledge

Using a term such as "transformation" may give the impression that theories of transformational generative grammar are intended as a model of the processes by which the human mind constructs and understands sentences, but Chomsky clearly stated that a generative grammar models only the knowledge that underlies the human ability to speak and understand, arguing that because most of that knowledge is innate, a baby can have a large body of knowledge about the structure of language in general and so need to ''learn'' only the idiosyncratic features of the language(s) to which it is exposed. Chomsky is not the first person to suggest that all languages have certain fundamental things in common. He quoted philosophers who posited the same basic idea several centuries ago. But Chomsky helped make the innateness theory respectable after a period dominated by more behaviorist attitudes towards language. He made concrete and technically sophisticated proposals about the structure of language as well as important proposals about how grammatical theories' success should be evaluated.


Grammaticality

Chomsky argued that "grammatical" and "ungrammatical" can be meaningfully and usefully defined. In contrast, an extreme behaviorist linguist would argue that language can be studied only through recordings or transcriptions of actual speech and that the role of the linguist is to look for patterns in such observed speech, not to hypothesize about why such patterns might occur or to label particular utterances grammatical or ungrammatical. Few linguists in the 1950s actually took such an extreme position, but Chomsky was on the opposite extreme, defining grammaticality in an unusually mentalistic way for the time. He argued that the intuition of a
native speaker Native Speaker may refer to: * ''Native Speaker'' (novel), a 1995 novel by Chang-Rae Lee * ''Native Speaker'' (album), a 2011 album by Canadian band Braids * Native speaker Native Speaker may refer to: * ''Native Speaker'' (novel), a 1995 nov ...
is enough to define the grammaticality of a sentence; that is, if a particular string of English words elicits a double-take or a feeling of wrongness in a native English speaker, with various extraneous factors affecting intuitions controlled for, it can be said that the string of words is ungrammatical. That, according to Chomsky, is entirely distinct from the question of whether a sentence is meaningful or can be understood. It is possible for a sentence to be both grammatical and meaningless, as in Chomsky's famous example, "
colorless green ideas sleep furiously ''Colorless green ideas sleep furiously'' is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book ''Syntactic Structures'' as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally ...
". But such sentences manifest a linguistic problem that is distinct from that posed by meaningful but ungrammatical (non)-sentences such as "man the bit sandwich the", the meaning of which is fairly clear, but which no
native speaker Native Speaker may refer to: * ''Native Speaker'' (novel), a 1995 novel by Chang-Rae Lee * ''Native Speaker'' (album), a 2011 album by Canadian band Braids * Native speaker Native Speaker may refer to: * ''Native Speaker'' (novel), a 1995 nov ...
would accept as well-formed. The use of such intuitive judgments permitted generative syntacticians to base their research on a methodology in which studying language through a
corpus Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics Music * ...
of observed speech became downplayed since the grammatical properties of constructed sentences were considered appropriate data on which to build a grammatical model.


Theory evaluation

In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relevant to the construction and evaluation of grammatical theories.


Competence versus performance

One was the distinction between '' competence'' and ''
performance A performance is an act of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment. It is also defined as the action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function. Management science In the work place ...
''. Chomsky noted the obvious fact that when people speak in the real world, they often make linguistic errors, such as starting a sentence and then abandoning it midway through. He argued that such errors in linguistic ''performance'' are 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, which greatly simplifies linguistic analysis.


Descriptive versus explanatory adequacy

The other idea related directly to evaluation of theories of grammar. Chomsky distinguished between grammars that achieve ''descriptive adequacy'' and those that go further and achieve ''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 insight into the mind's underlying linguistic structures. In other words, it does not merely describe the grammar of a language, but makes predictions about how linguistic knowledge is mentally represented. For Chomsky, such mental representations are largely innate and so if a grammatical theory has explanatory adequacy, it must be able to explain different languages' grammatical nuances 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 descriptive adequacy would come only if linguists held explanatory adequacy as their goal: real insight into individual languages' structure can be gained only by comparative study of a wide range of languages, on the assumption that they are all cut from the same cloth.


Development of concepts

Though transformations continue to be important in Chomsky's theories, he has now abandoned the original notion of deep structure and surface structure. Initially, two additional levels of representation were introduced—logical form (LF) and phonetic form (PF), but in the 1990s, Chomsky sketched a new program of research known at first as ''
Minimalism In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...
'', in which deep structure and surface structure are no longer featured and PF and LF remain as the only levels of representation. To complicate the understanding of the development of Chomsky's theories, the precise meanings of deep structure and surface structure have changed over time. By the 1970s, Chomskyan linguists normally called them D-Structure and S-Structure. In particular, Chomskyan linguists dropped for good the idea that a sentence's deep structure determined its meaning (taken to its logical conclusions by generative semanticists during the same period) when LF took over this role (previously, Chomsky and
Ray Jackendoff Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always str ...
had begun to argue that both deep and surface structure determined meaning).


"I-language" and "E-language"

In 1986, Chomsky proposed a distinction between I-language and E-language that is similar but not identical to the competence/performance distinction. "I-language" is internal language; "E-language" is external language. I-language is taken to be the object of study in linguistic theory; it is the mentally represented linguistic knowledge a native speaker of a language has and thus a mental object. From that perspective, most of theoretical linguistics is a branch of psychology. E-language encompasses all other notions of what a language is, such as a body of knowledge or behavioural habits shared by a community. Thus E-language is not a coherent concept by itself, and Chomsky argues that such notions of language are not useful in the study of innate linguistic knowledge or competence even though they may seem sensible and intuitive and useful in other areas of study. Competence, he argues, can be studied only if languages are treated as mental objects.


Minimalist program

From the mid-1990s onward, much research in transformational grammar has been inspired by Chomsky's
minimalist program In linguistics, the minimalist program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky. Following Imre Lakatos's distinction, Chomsky presents minima ...
. It aims to further develop ideas involving "economy of derivation" and "economy of representation", which had started to become significant in the early 1990s but were still rather peripheral aspects of transformational-generative grammar theory: *Economy of derivation is the principle that movements, or transformations, occur only to match ''interpretable features'' with ''uninterpretable features''. An example of an interpretable feature is the plural
inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
on regular English nouns, e.g., ''dogs''. The word ''dogs'' can be used to refer only to several dogs, not a single dog, and so the inflection contributes to meaning by making it ''interpretable''. English verbs are inflected according to the
number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers c ...
of their subject ("Dogs bite" v. "A dog bite''s''"), but in most sentences, that inflection just duplicates the information about number that the subject noun already has, and the inflection is therefore ''uninterpretable''. *Economy of representation is the principle that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose: the structure of a sentence should be no larger or more complex than required to satisfy constraints on grammaticality. Both notions, as described here, are somewhat vague, and their precise formulation is controversial. An additional aspect of minimalist thought is the idea that the derivation of syntactic structures should be ''uniform'': rules should not be stipulated as applying at arbitrary points in a derivation but instead apply throughout derivations. Minimalist approaches to phrase structure have resulted in "Bare Phrase Structure", an attempt to eliminate
X-bar theory In linguistics, X-bar theory is a model of phrase-structure grammar and a theory of syntactic category formation that was first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1970Chomsky, Noam (1970). Remarks on Nominalization. In: R. Jacobs and P. Rosenbaum (eds.) ...
. In 1998, Chomsky suggested that derivations proceed in phases. The distinction between deep structure and surface structure is absent in Minimalist theories of syntax, and the most recent phase-based theories also eliminate LF and PF as unitary levels of representation.


Critical reception

In 1978, linguist and historian
E. F. K. Koerner Ernst Frideryk Konrad Koerner (5 February 1939 – 6 January 2022) was a German author, researcher, professor of linguistics, and historian of linguistics. Early life and education Koerner was born on the family manor in Mlewiec, near Toruń, ...
hailed transformational grammar as the third and last Kuhnian revolution in linguistics, arguing that it had brought about a shift from
Ferdinand de Saussure Ferdinand de Saussure (; ; 26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widel ...
's sociological approach to a Chomskyan conception of linguistics as analogous to chemistry and physics. Koerner also praised the philosophical and psychological value of Chomsky's theory. In 1983 Koerner retracted his earlier statement suggesting that transformational grammar was a 1960s fad that had spread across the U.S. at a time when the federal government had invested heavily in new linguistic departments. But he claims Chomsky's work is unoriginal when compared to other syntactic models of the time. According to Koerner, Chomsky's rise to fame was orchestrated by Bernard Bloch, editor of ''
Language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
'', the journal of the
Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...
, and
Roman Jakobson Roman Osipovich Jakobson (russian: Рома́н О́сипович Якобсо́н; October 11, 1896Kucera, Henry. 1983. "Roman Jakobson." ''Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America'' 59(4): 871–883. – July 18,Chomsky's father. Koerner suggests that great sums of money were spent to fly foreign students to the 1962 International Congress at
Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
, where an exceptional opportunity was arranged for Chomsky to give a keynote speech making questionable claims of belonging to the rationalist tradition of Saussure, Humboldt and the
Port-Royal Grammar The ''Port-Royal Grammar'' (originally ''Grammaire générale et raisonnée contenant les fondemens de l'art de parler, expliqués d'une manière claire et naturelle'', "General and Rational Grammar, containing the fundamentals of the art of speaki ...
, in order to win popularity among the Europeans. The transformational agenda was subsequently forced through at American conferences where students, instructed by Chomsky, regularly verbally attacked and ridiculed his potential opponents.


See also

*
Antisymmetry In linguistics, antisymmetry is a syntactic theory presented in Richard S. Kayne's 1994 monograph ''The Antisymmetry of Syntax''. It asserts that grammatical hierarchies in natural language follow a universal order, namely specifier-head-compl ...
*
Biolinguistics Biolinguistics can be defined as the study of biology and the evolution of language. It is highly interdisciplinary as it is related to various fields such as biology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, mathematics, and neurolinguistics to ex ...
*
Generalised phrase structure grammar Generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG) is a framework for describing the syntax and semantics of natural languages. It is a type of constraint-based phrase structure grammar. Constraint based grammars are based around defining certain syntacti ...
* Generative semantics *
Head-driven phrase structure grammar Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammar developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar, and it is the immediate successor to ...
*
Heavy NP shift Heavy NP shift is an operation that involves re-ordering ( shifting) a "heavy" noun phrase (NP) to a position to the right of its canonical position under certain circumstances. The heaviness of the NP is determined by its grammatical complexity; wh ...
*
Jerzy Kuryłowicz Jerzy Kuryłowicz (; 26 August 1895 – 28 January 1978) was a Polish linguist who studied Indo-European languages. Life Born in Stanislawow, Austria-Hungary. He was a Polish historical linguist, structuralist and language theoretician, deeply i ...
* Lexical functional grammar *
Minimalist program In linguistics, the minimalist program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky. Following Imre Lakatos's distinction, Chomsky presents minima ...
*
Parasitic gap In generative grammar, a parasitic gap is a construction in which one gap appears to be dependent on another gap. Thus, the one gap can appear only by virtue of the appearance of the other gap, hence the former is said to be "parasitic" on the latte ...
*
Structural linguistics Structural linguistics, or structuralism, in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating Semiotics, semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other element ...
*
Transformational syntax In linguistics, transformational syntax is a derivational approach to syntax that developed from the extended standard theory of generative grammar originally proposed by Noam Chomsky in his books ''Syntactic Structures'' and ''Aspects of the Theory ...


References


Bibliography

* * * *


External links


What is I-language?
- Chapter 1 of I-language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science.

– an online textbook on transformational grammar. * {{DEFAULTSORT:Transformational Grammar Generative syntax Grammar frameworks Noam Chomsky *