In
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, a transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is a
generative grammarIn theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences...
, especially of a
natural languageIn the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
, that has been developed in the
Chomskyan traditionSyntactic Structures is an seminal book in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. It laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar...
of
phrase structure grammarsThe term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by Noam Chomsky as the term for grammars as defined by phrase structure rules, i.e. rewrite rules of the type studied previously by Emil Post and Axel Thue...
(as opposed to
dependency grammarsDependency grammar is a class of modern syntactic theories that are all based on the dependency relation and that can be traced back primarily to the work of Lucien Tesnière. Dependency grammars are distinct from phrase structure grammars , since they lack phrasal nodes. Structure is determined by...
). Additionally, transformational grammar is the Chomskyan tradition that gives rise to specific transformational grammars. Much current research in transformational grammar is inspired by Chomsky's
Minimalist ProgramIn linguistics, the Minimalist Program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early nineties. It started with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky....
.
Deep structure and surface structure
In 1957,
Noam ChomskyAvram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
published
Syntactic StructuresSyntactic Structures is an seminal book in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. It laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar...
, in which he developed the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation — a
deep structureIn linguistics, specifically in the study of syntax in the tradition of generative grammar , the deep structure of a linguistic expression is a theoretical construct that seeks to unify several related structures. For example, the sentences "Pat loves Chris" and "Chris is loved by Pat" mean...
and a surface structure. The deep structure represented the core
semantic relationsSemantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
of a sentence, and was mapped on to the surface structure (which followed the
phonologicalPhonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
form of the sentence very closely) via transformations. Chomsky believed there are considerable similarities between languages' deep structures, and that these structures 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 grammarIn formal language theory, a context-free grammar is a formal grammar in which every production rule is of the formwhere V is a single nonterminal symbol, and w is a string of terminals and/or nonterminals ....
s. Similarly, deep structure was devised largely for technical reasons relating to early
semantic theorySemantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
. Chomsky emphasizes the importance of modern formal mathematical devices in the development of grammatical theory:
Development of basic concepts
Though transformations continue to be important in Chomsky's current theories, he has now abandoned the original notion of Deep Structure and Surface Structure. Initially, two additional levels of representation were introduced (LF — Logical Form, and PF — Phonetic Form), and then in the 1990s Chomsky sketched out a new program of research known as
MinimalismIn linguistics, the Minimalist Program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early nineties. It started with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky....
, in which Deep Structure and Surface Structure no longer featured and PF and LF remained as the only levels of representation.
To complicate the understanding of the development of Noam Chomsky's theories, the precise meanings of Deep Structure and Surface Structure have changed over time — by the 1970s, the two were normally referred to simply as D-Structure and S-Structure by Chomskyan linguists. In particular, the idea that the meaning of a sentence was determined by its Deep Structure (taken to its logical conclusions by the
generative semanticistsGenerative semantics is the name of a research program within linguistics, initiated by the work of various early students of Noam Chomsky: John R. Ross, Paul Postal and later James McCawley...
during the same period) was dropped for good by Chomskyan linguists when LF took over this role (previously, Chomsky and
Ray JackendoffRay Jackendoff 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...
had begun to argue that meaning was determined by both Deep and Surface Structure).
Innate linguistic knowledge
Terms such as "transformation" can give the impression that theories of transformational generative grammar are intended as a model for the processes through which the human mind constructs and understands sentences. Chomsky is clear that this is not in fact the case: a generative grammar models only the knowledge that underlies the human ability to speak and understand. One of the most important of Chomsky's ideas is that most of this knowledge is innate, with the result that a baby can have a large body of prior knowledge about the structure of language in general, and need only actually learn the idiosyncratic features of the language(s) it is exposed to. Chomsky was not the first person to suggest that all languages had certain fundamental things in common (he quotes philosophers writing several centuries ago who had the same basic idea), but he helped to make the innateness theory respectable after a period dominated by more
behavioristBehaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
attitudes towards language. Perhaps more significantly, he made concrete and technically sophisticated proposals about the structure of language, and made important proposals regarding how the success of grammatical theories should be evaluated.
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
competenceLinguistic competence is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speakers of a language, it is in contrast to the concept of Linguistic performance, the way the language system is used in communication...
and
performanceIn linguistics, performance has two senses:It is also one of the two elements in Chomsky's performance-competence distinction, which relates to Language production , with an emphasis upon how this is different from Competence, or the mental knowledge of language itself...
. 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 representedA representation, in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science, is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality, or else a mental process that makes use of such a symbol; "a formal system for making explicit certain entities or types...
. 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.
"I-Language" and "E-Language"
In 1986, Chomsky proposed a distinction between I-Language and E-Language, similar but not identical to the competence/performance distinction. (I-language) refers to Internal language and is contrasted with External Language (or E-language). I-Language is taken to be the object of study in linguistic theory; it is the mentally represented linguistic knowledge that a native speaker of a language has, and is therefore a mental object — from this perspective, most of theoretical
linguisticsLinguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
is a branch of
psychologyPsychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
. E-Language encompasses all other notions of what a language is, for example that it is a body of knowledge or behavioural habits shared by a community. Thus, E-Language is not itself a coherent concept, and Chomsky argues that such notions of language are not useful in the study of innate linguistic knowledge, i.e., competence, even though they may seem sensible and intuitive, and useful in other areas of study. Competence, he argues, can only be studied if languages are treated as mental objects.
Grammaticality
Chomsky argued that the notions "grammatical" and "ungrammatical" could be defined in a meaningful and useful way. In contrast, an extreme behaviorist linguist would argue that language can only be studied through recordings or transcriptions of actual speech, the role of the linguist being to look for patterns in such observed speech, but not to hypothesize about why such patterns might occur, nor to label particular utterances as either "grammatical" or "ungrammatical." Although few linguists in the 1950s actually took such an extreme position, Chomsky was at an opposite extreme, defining grammaticality in an unusually
mentalisticIn psychology, mentalism refers to those branches of study that concentrate on mental perception and thought processes, like cognitive psychology...
way (for the time). He argued that the intuition of a
native speakerNative Speaker is Chang-Rae Lee’s first novel. In Native Speaker, he creates a man named Henry Park who tries to assimilate into American society and become a “native speaker.”-Plot summary:...
is enough to define the grammaticalness of a sentence; that is, if a particular string of English words elicits a double take, or feeling of wrongness in a native English speaker, and when various extraneous factors affecting intuitions are controlled for, it can be said that the string of words is ungrammatical. This, 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 Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical. The term was originally used in his 1955 thesis "Logical Structures of Linguistic Theory"...
." But such sentences manifest a linguistic problem 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 no
native speakerNative Speaker is Chang-Rae Lee’s first novel. In Native Speaker, he creates a man named Henry Park who tries to assimilate into American society and become a “native speaker.”-Plot summary:...
would accept as well formed.
The use of such intuitive judgments permitted generative
syntacticiansIn linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
to base their research on a methodology in which studying language through a
corpusA speech corpus is a database of speech audio files and text transcriptions.In Speech technology, speech corpora are used, among other things, to create acoustic models ....
of observed speech became downplayed, since the grammatical properties of constructed sentences were considered to be appropriate data to build a grammatical model on.
Minimalism
From the mid-1990s onwards, much research in transformational grammar has been inspired by Chomsky's
Minimalist ProgramIn linguistics, the Minimalist Program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early nineties. It started with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky....
. The "Minimalist Program" aims at the further development of 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 a principle stating that movements (i.e., transformations) only occur in order to match interpretable features with uninterpretable features. An example of an interpretable feature is the plural inflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
on regular English nouns, e.g., dogs. The word dogs can only be used to refer to several dogs, not a single dog, and so this inflection contributes to meaning, making it interpretable. English verbs are inflected according to the numberIn linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
of their subject (e.g., "Dogs bite" vs "A dog bites"), but in most sentences this inflection just duplicates the information about number that the subject noun already has, and it is therefore uninterpretable.
- Economy of representation is the principle that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose, i.e., 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 indeed the precise formulation of these principles is controversial.
An additional aspect of minimalist thought is the idea that the derivation of syntactic structures should be uniform; that is, 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 theoryX-bar theory is a component of linguistic theory which attempts to identify syntactic features presumably common to all those human languages that fit in a presupposed framework...
.
In 1998, Chomsky suggested that derivations proceed in phases. The distinction of
Deep StructureIn linguistics, specifically in the study of syntax in the tradition of generative grammar , the deep structure of a linguistic expression is a theoretical construct that seeks to unify several related structures. For example, the sentences "Pat loves Chris" and "Chris is loved by Pat" mean...
vs. Surface Structure is not present in Minimalist theories of syntax, and the most recent phase-based theories also eliminate LF and PF as unitary levels of representation.
Mathematical representation
Returning to the more general mathematical notion of a grammar, an important feature of all transformational grammars is that they are more powerful than
context-free grammarIn formal language theory, a context-free grammar is a formal grammar in which every production rule is of the formwhere V is a single nonterminal symbol, and w is a string of terminals and/or nonterminals ....
s. This idea was formalized by Chomsky in the
Chomsky hierarchyWithin the field of computer science, specifically in the area of formal languages, the Chomsky hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars....
. Chomsky argued that it is impossible to describe the structure of natural languages using context-free grammars. His general position regarding the non-context-freeness of natural language has held up since then, although his specific examples regarding the inadequacy of CFGs in terms of their weak generative capacity were later disproven.
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 theoryGovernment and binding is a theory of syntax and a phrase structure grammar in the tradition of transformational grammar developed principally by Noam Chomsky in the 1980s...
) 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 rulesPhrase-structure rules are a way to describe a given language's syntax. They are used to break down a natural language sentence into its constituent parts namely phrasal categories and lexical categories...
.
For example, a typical transformation in TG is the operation of
subject-auxiliary inversionIn English, subject-auxiliary inversion occurs when an auxiliary verb precedes a subject. This is an exception to the English word order convention of subjects preceding their corresponding verbs...
(SAI). This rule takes as its input a declarative sentence with an auxiliary: "John has eaten all the heirloom tomatoes." and transforms it into "Has John eaten all the heirloom tomatoes?" In their original formulation (Chomsky 1957), these rules were stated as rules that held over strings of either terminals or constituent symbols or both.
- X NP AUX Y
X AUX NP Y
(where NP = Noun Phrase and AUX = Auxiliary)
In the 1970s, by the time of the Extended Standard Theory, following the work of Joseph Emonds 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 are 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 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 of 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 theoryGovernment and binding is a theory of syntax and a phrase structure grammar in the tradition of transformational grammar developed principally by Noam Chomsky in the 1980s...
, GTs were abandoned in favor of
recursiveRecursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way. For instance, when the surfaces of two mirrors are exactly parallel with each other the nested images that occur are a form of infinite recursion. The term has a variety of meanings specific to a variety of disciplines ranging from...
phrase structure rules. However, they are still present in
tree-adjoining grammarTree-adjoining grammar 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...
as the Substitution and Adjunction operations, and they have recently re-emerged in mainstream generative grammar in Minimalism, as the operations Merge and Move.
In
generative phonologyPhonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
, another form of transformation is the
phonological ruleA 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 operations and computations the human brain performs...
, which describes a mapping between an
underlying representationIn some models of phonology as well as morphophonology, the underlying representation or underlying form of a word or morpheme is the abstract form the word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phonological rules have applied to it. If more rules apply to the same form, they can apply...
(the
phonemeIn a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
) and the surface form that is articulated during
natural speechSpoken language is a form of human communication in which words derived from a large vocabulary together with a diverse variety of names are uttered through or with the mouth. All words are made up from a limited set of vowels and consonants. The spoken words they make are stringed into...
.
See also
- Antisymmetry
In linguistics, antisymmetry is a theory of syntactic linearization presented in Richard Kayne's 1994 monograph The Antisymmetry of Syntax. The crux of this theory is that hierarchical structure in natural language maps universally onto a particular surface linearization, namely...
- Generalised phrase structure grammar
Generalised phrase structure grammar is a framework for describing the syntax and semantics of natural languages. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar. GPSG was initially developed in the late 1970s by Gerald Gazdar. Other contributors include Ewan Klein,...
- Generative semantics
Generative semantics is the name of a research program within linguistics, initiated by the work of various early students of Noam Chomsky: John R. Ross, Paul Postal and later James McCawley...
- Head-driven phrase structure grammar
Head-driven phrase structure grammar is a highly lexicalized, non-derivational generative grammar theory developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. It is the immediate successor to generalized phrase structure grammar. HPSG draws from other fields such as computer science and uses Ferdinand de...
- Heavy NP shift
"Heavy NP shift" is a grammatical phenomenon where a "heavy" noun phrase appears in a position to the right of its canonical position under certain circumstances...
- Lexical functional grammar
Lexical functional grammar is a grammar framework in theoretical linguistics, a variety of generative grammar. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to...
- Parasitic gap
In grammar, a parasitic gap is a construction wherein the dropping of an argument is dependent on a co-varying argument having been fronted in a local context.-Discovery:...
- Jerzy Kuryłowicz
External links