University English Assignment: Transformational Grammar Analysis

This essay examines transformational grammar, a linguistic theory developed by Noam Chomsky. It begins by explaining deep and surface structures, the core semantic representation and its transformation. The essay traces the evolution of Chomsky's theories, including the shift from deep and surface structures to LF and PF in Minimalism. It explores key concepts such as innate linguistic knowledge, the distinction between competence and performance, and the difference between I-language and E-language. The essay discusses grammaticality, mathematical representation, and transformations, including generalized transformations. Overall, the essay provides a comprehensive overview of transformational grammar, its evolution, and its core concepts.

Running head: ENGLISH
English
Name of the Student
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Author Note

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Transformational grammar
Deep structure and surface structure
According to the Syntactic structure published by Noam Chomsky, in language each
sentence possess two types of representation, namely, deep structure as well as surface structure
Deep structure is found to represent the core semantic relation of a sentence and hence is mapped
on the surface structure via transformation. Transformation can be proposed before the concept
of the unfathomable configuration as a mean of enhancing the numerical as well as expressive
power of the context free grammar. Likewise, profound construction has been made for
methodological reason associated to the early semantic theory.
Development of basic concepts
With time Chomsky abandoned the theory of deep and surface structure. However,
transformation continued to be a crucial part of his current theories. According his new theory of
Minimalism, Deep as well as surface structure has lost its eminence and both LF and PF
remained as the only representation level. The meaning of both profound construction and plane
construction has got changed over a number of times. While initially, D-structure used to
determine the meaning of a sentence, later LF took over the role.
Innate linguistic knowledge
Noam Chomsky had made it clear that transformational grammar is not intended for the
process through which human mind understands as well as construct sentences. According to
him, generative sentence structure only demonstrate the knowledge which underlies the ability of
the human too speak as well as understand. Majority of the knowledge is innate. Chomsky

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further helped to make the theory of innateness respectable significantly by making concrete as
well as technologically sophisticated proposals about the language structure along with making
crucial proposals about how the accomplishment of grammatical theories can be evaluated.
According to Chomsky, there is no necessity to make n infant learn about any actual rule which
is explicit to a specific language at all. Instead, all the languages follow a specific set of rules.
However, the effect of the mentioned rules along with the connections between them has the
potential to vary on the basis of the values of specific linguistic parameters. Being a highly
sturdy supposition, the mentioned theory is considered to be one of the most unique theories of
language.
Grammatical theories
Chomsky, in the year 1960, introduced two central ideas associated with construction as
well as evaluation of the grammatical theory. The first idea pointed out the difference between
competence and performance. According to him, the errors made by individuals during speaking
are irrelevant to the linguistic competence. When it comes to the second idea, it is directly
associated with the evaluation of the theories of grammar. Chomsky is found to be made a
difference between grammar that attained descriptive adequacy as well as grammar that attains
explanatory adequacy. According to the theory, the grammar that achieves explanatory adequacy
posses the property of providing an insight into the linguistic structure underlying the human
mind. He explained that the explanatory adequacy of the grammatical theory enable it to explain
any type of grammatical nuances of the language of the world. According to him, progress in
term of descriptive adequacy will only come only if explanatory adequacy is considered to be the
goal. According to the Chomsky, real insight into the structure of the individual languages can
only be gained with the help of comparative study of a wide variety of languages.

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"I-Language" and "E-Language"
According to Chomsky, there prevails a difference between the I-language and the E-
language. I language is considered to be mentally represented as the linguistic knowledge that a
native speaker of a language possess. On the other hand, E-language is not a coherent concept by
itself but encompasses the notions of languages. Chomsky argued that competency of a language
can only be studied in case languages are treated as psychological objects.
Grammaticality
According to Chomsky, notion be it grammatical or ungrammatical can be defined in an
effectively useful as well as meaningful way. Contrary to this, linguist looks for patterns in an
observed speech instead of hypothesizing about the reason behind the occurrence neither of the
patterns nor to label scrupulous utterances as either ungrammatical or grammatical. Chomsky
said that a native speaker's perception is sufficient to define a sentence. He said that if a certain
string of English words gives a double meaning, as is a sense of complaint in the mother-tongue,
the string of words may be considered ungrammatic. This can be considered as a completely
different from the problem of if a sentence is meaningful but ungrammatical sentences. Such
sentence, in spite of having a clear meaning is not accepted as being well formed.
The use of spontaneous judgements by generative syntactics based on the investigation of
a way in which learning language is reduced to a level of grammar by the corpus of the
pragmatic speech. It is believed that it would have been impossible to construct generative
grammars as a kind of mental grammar without the change in philosophy.
Minimalism

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Within the mid 1990s to mid 20s, a good number of researches in the field of
transformational grammar got inspired by the minimalistic program of Chomsky. The aim of the
mentioned program was to further develop the ideas that are involved in economy of derivation
as well as the economy of representation that has initiated for becoming significant in the early
90s. When it comes to the Economy of derivation, it is referred to the principle stating that
movements only takes place for matching interpretable features with the uninterruptable features.
The verbs in English are not inflected keeping accordance with the grammatical number of their
subject.
Mathematical representation
One of the most crucial features of all transformational grammar includes their greater
power compared to that of the grammars free of contexts. This idea of transformational grammar
was idealized first by Noam Chomsky and is popularly known as Chomsky Hierarchy. It has
been argued by Chomsky that it is not possible to explain the configuration of natural language
with the help of context free grammars. The generally position of Chomsky about the non
context freeness of the natural language has been emphasized since then. However when it
comes too his specific example associated with the insufficiency of the CFGs in term of their
weak generative capacity, it had been later disapproven.
Transformations
As far as "transformation" is concerned, it is defined in linguistics as a rule which
incorporates in standard theory an input known as the deep structure. It is called the D structure
both in extended standard theory and in binding theory. The D structure changes itself in a

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specific restricted way for resulting in a surface structure. IN TGG, a set of phrase is responsible
for generating Deep structures.
For instance, a typical transformation in TG is the operations of subject–auxiliary
inversions. The mentioned rule takes a declarative sentence as its input along with an auxiliary.
For instance the sentence “John has eaten tomato’ gets converted into ‘Has john eaten tomatoes?’
In TGG, deep structure gets generated with the help of a set of phrases structure rules. These
rules are considered to be the rules that held the strings of terminals as well as constituent
symbol or both.
X NP AUX Y X AUX NP Y
(Where NP is equal to Noun Phrase as well as AUX is equal to Auxiliary)
In the year 1970, during the extended standard theory, transformations were viewed as
holding over trees. During the late 1980s, during the end of the government and binding theory,
transformations are not considered to be the structure changing operation. Instead they added
information for already existing trees with the help of copying constituents.
The earliest conceptions of transformation were considered as building-specific devices.
For example, a transformation prevails which transforms active sentences into passive sentences.
Various transformations have brought subjects to the topic of the main clause into sentences.
During the year 1970, as the result of the shift of rules to principle as well as constraints, the
mentioned construction specific transformation was found to be morphed into generic rules. All
the instances were mentioned to be the instances of NP movement. This in turn was found to
eventually get changed into a single general rule of move Alpha.

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Transformation can actually segregated in to the following factors, namely, the post deep
structure and the generalized transformation. The Generalized transformation was proposed
during the earliest form of generative grammar. Small structure that are either atomic or are
generated by other rule are taken as well as combined. For instance, the generalized
transformation associated with the embedding will take the kernel’ John said x’ as well as the
kernel ‘Ron like smoking’ and will combine the two kernels as ‘John said Don likes smoking’.
GTs is thus considered to be structure building instead of structured changing.