V Transformational grammar

NP VP

S

Dress.   Alternatively, parentheses can be used (Palmer, 1971):   E.g. (((A) ((young) (man))) ((with) ((a) (paper)))) (follow) (ed))) (((the) (girl)) ((with) ((a) ((blue) (dress)))))).   However the best way to show IC structure is to use a tree diagram similar to the sort also employed by generative grammarians and transformational generative grammarians. A tree diagram is a way of encoding constituency, i.e. a representation of what speakers understand about interrelations of individual words:   Chart 1. Tree diagram of a sentence  

Blue

A

With

Girl

Ed|| the

Paper | follow

A

Man || with

Young

Det N V

NP

The man read

Det N

every book

S → NP VP Det = { the, a, every }

NP → PN N = { man, woman, book, hill, telescope }

NP → Det N PN = { John, Mary }

PP → P NP P = { on, with }

VP → V V = { saw, put, open, read, reads }

VP → V NP

VP → V NP PP

This approach is concerned with the surface structure of language, i.e. it deals only with the language that is physically manifest and makes no mention of underlying structures or categories of any kind.

IC as conceived by Bloomfield (1933-5), in spite of its shortcomings, presented a great advantage over the haphazard “methodology” of traditional grammatical classification and parsing. Modern linguists admit that constituents are the greatest gift that structural grammarians have given to the world of English grammar. But as structuralists denied generalizations, i.e. theory, nothing remained after them except method which may be estimated as a particularly impoverished state for a “science” [Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 99].

“Given the state of affairs, it is not surprising that Chomsky was able to bring about a revolution in linguistics” [Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 100] and “since the late 1950’s structural grammar has been challenged by transformational grammar”[4].

“Transformational Generative grammar is primarily an outgrowth of taxonomic linguistics and secondarily a return to some of the main tenets of traditional grammar”[5]. The body of work of transformational grammar[6] owes its inspiration to the insights of Noam Chomsky in the mid-50s as his approach became one of the most influential syntactic theories of the XX^th century. Although by no means all practising linguists adhere to its principles, none can ignore them and the mainstream of linguistics since 1957, the year when Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures appeared, has been dominated by Noam Chomsky.

According to N. Chomsky, the aim of grammar is not connected with the procedure of discovering speech regularities, but it boils down to modeling native speakers’ activities. Noam Chomsky looked upon grammar as a mechanism responsible for generating sentences [Алпатов 1999: 310-311]. That’s why Chomsky’s grammar is not only transformational but also generative. Moreover, unlike traditional linguistics, the main claim of generative grammar is that speech generation starts at the level of abstract syntactic structures and goes down to the phonological level. On top of that, Noam Chomsky’s approach was revolutionary in ‘its commitment to a construction of an explanatory linguistic theory’[7].

In brief, the tenets of transformational generative grammar may be summed up as follows:

1. Grammar should be descriptive, not prescriptive.
2. Grammars should characterize competence, not performance.
3. Grammars should be fully explicit.
4. Linguistic analysis should be maximally general.
5. The theory of grammar should make universal claims.
6. Grammars should be psychologically relevant [The Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 297-300].

In Syntactic Structures (1957) Chomsky proposed that grammar should be considered as an autonomous system, independent of semantic or phonological systems though of course bearing a relation to them. Furthermore, he proposed that syntax itself should consist of a number of distinct but related levels, each of which bears a particular part of the descriptive burden. The two most important are phrase-structure and transformational components.

The phrase-structure is an underlying structure, or deep structure. “…the post–lexical structures are called DEEP STRUCTURES”[8]. The phrase-structure includes a noun-phrase (NP) and a verb-phrase (VP). A noun-phrase normally contains at least one noun (the head of the phrase), possibly with other elements such as determiners and adjectives, or a relative clause or another modifier. A verb-phrase includes the complements of the verb as a direct object, indirect object, and even a sentence:

E.g. They [saw me ]. She [gave the book to me ]. You [said that you would arrive on time ].

The transformation is a structural change. For example, the question Is Pat here? is derived by transformation from the declarative Pat is here. But to be a transformation the change should employ the same lexemes, no new lexemes can be introduced, cf.: Лес шумит → шум леса, but not => Лес производит шум [9]. Thus, transformations are “essentially rules for relating one syntactic structure to another” [The Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 100]. That means that a transformational rule is a rule that maps one syntactic-analysis tree into another. This is done with the help of adjoining, moving, deleting, or copying a constituent. The overall structure of the model as it applies to simple sentences is as follows:

Phrase-structure rules: “Underlying structure”/Deep structure

¯

Transformations

¯

Surface structure

Phrase-structure rules are general principles which determine what kinds of sentence structures are possible in a language.

Though transformational theory is quite complex it can be roughly described in two rules which in their turn account for the name of the whole approach. “The fundamental idea is that surface structures are formed through the interaction of at least two distinct types of rules: base rules, which generate abstract phrase structure representations; and transformational rules, which move elements and otherwise rearrange structures to give the surface structures”[10]. The overly rich, descriptive rule systems of the 50s and 60s have gradually been replaced by simpler, more constrained rule systems. On the whole, linguists were after general, universal principles which govern the form and functioning of these rules and the properties of their inputs and outputs.

Thus, transformation is a formal linguistic operation (a transformational rule) that shows a correspondence between two structures, e.g. active and passive voice sentences. According to N. Chomsky, “syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages”. He understood grammar as a device that puts pieces of sentences together according to precise rules. These rules make it possible to describe grammar systematically, as opposed to the more anecdotal approach of traditional grammars [The Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 297]. That’s why the main attention was paid to all kinds of transformations possible in the language. But the meaning was completely overlooked. Thus structural ambiguities were not covered by this kind of analysis (cf. I shot [an elephant] [in my pajamas] ÷ I shot [an elephant [in my pajamas] ]). Moreover, transformational analysis was mainly restricted to simple sentences.

Vehement criticism of Chomskyan linguistics comes from researchers who underline its highly abstract, in-depth character, dependence of grammaticality judgments on the linguistic experience of a native speaker, overall claims made about linguistic universals. Sometimes generative grammar analyses break down when applied to languages which have not previously been studied. Moreover, another common criticism of Chomskyan analysis of specific language is that they force all languages into an English-like mold, by which they mean the SVO (subject-verb-object) pattern. Transformational analysis was also criticized as it did not make distinctions between different interpretations of one and the same grammatical structure (in sentences like Flying planes can be dangerous / I shot an elephant in my pajamas). Similarly transformational analysis was not applicable to some linguistic structures, cf.: John gave a book to Mary → John gave Mary a book, but not John asked Mary a question or They transmitted enemy propaganda.

To sum up Chomsky’s contribution to linguistic theory, it should be noted that it was Noam Chomsky who put syntax at the centre of linguistics where formerly it had stood quietly at the back door. Secondly, grammar, by Chomsky, was seen “as a theory of a language, constrained and evaluated just as any other theory in the sciences” [Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 100]. Chomsky and his followers aimed at constructing a completely explicit formula that would generate the infinitude of the sentences of the language. The goal of Chomsky’s theory was “to describe language as a property of the human mind and to explain its source”[11]. In other words, “a generative grammar is a formal system (of rules, later of principles and parameters) which makes explicit the finite mechanisms available to the brain to produce infinite sentences in ways that have empirical consequences and can be tested as in the natural sciences” [Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 100]. Thus “the generative grammarian is concerned with the construction of a viable theory of linguistic competence”[12]. Thirdly, he was explicit pointing out that semantic intuitions should not play a role in linguistic description. An overall contribution made by N. Chomsky to language study was that his “Syntactic Structures” triggered an intense research program in linguistics and related sciences.

Chomsky's first crops of linguistics Ph.D.'s began to appear in the mid 1960's, and thereafter increasing numbers of American linguists were taught by linguists who had been taught by Chomsky himself. These students, and their students, tended to inherit the idea that little of substantial value had been said about language in the centuries immediately prior to Chomsky. In the late 1960's and early 1970's several developments altered this picture.

v Generative semantics (60-s – 70-s)

The primary issue about meaning at the time of L. Bloomfield and N. Chomsky was whether or not intuitions about meaning should play any role in determining grammatical (= syntactic, morphological, or phonological) analysis. The worry was that if they were allowed to play a role, they would contaminate the analyses. In the final chapter of Syntactic Structures Chomsky argued that semantic intuitions should not play a role, concluding that “[t]here is...little evidence that "intuition about meaning" is at all useful in the actual investigation of linguistic form”[13]. In the decades following, linguists found themselves unable to resist looking at meaning. The ability of one and the same sentence to express different content was illustrated by the famous examples like Visiting relatives can be annoying, Hunting tigers can be dangerous, or Flying planes can be dangerous. On the other hand, one and the same content may be expressed by different sentences: The builders are building the house and The house was being built by the workers or even The house which was being built by the... Thus, Chomsky’s followers began to understand that it was not structure but meaning that contributed to speech generation. A couple of developments in syntactic analysis made possible the main tenet of the school of thought called generative semantics: that the deep structure of a sentence constitutes a representation of its meaning. Following the work of linguists such as Charles Fillmore, Paul Postal, James McCawley, John R. Ross, and George and Robin Lakoff, deep structures took on some of the aspects of a semantic representation.

Thus, the notion of deep structure advanced by Noam Chomsky became the so-called apple of discord. The representatives of generative semantics, such as G. Lakoff and J. McCawley considered such a theoretical construct as a deep structure useless. The leading idea of generative semantics is that there is no principled distinction between syntactic processes and semantic processes. The notion of “deep structure” was vigorously opposed by generative semanticists. Instead they propounded the idea of the semantic level where all the information relevant for the syntactic structure of the sentence is accumulated. This level (called underlying or semantic structure) comprises the basic grammatical relations and selectional restrictions. The underlying structure is an abstract structure which represents all the semantic features, constituting the meaning of a sentence. It includes not only the semantic elements corresponding to the syntactic elements of a sentence, but also “abstract” higher verbs, which cannot be found in the corresponding syntactic structure. Thus, in the sentence John killed Bill the underlying structure can be represented with the help of a lexical paraphrase John caused Bill to become not alive, which explicitly shows the abstract higher verb to cause. The sentence Open the door! can be paraphrased into I order you to open the door where the sentence-type marker is represented by the verb to order.

Another idea put forward by generative semanticists (J. Katz, J. Fodor) is that the word is characterized by distinct semantic features like a phoneme does. These features are opposed to each other in the system of binary oppositions (e.g., animate/inanimate, human/non-human, etc.). This semantic network can be represented in the form of a tree diagram of semantic constituents. Moreover, J. Katz and J. Fodor introduce a system of projection rules which guide selection of meanings which words have in isolation (e.g., in The man hits the colorful ball the occurrence of hits blocks the reading of ball as a formal gathering for social dancing). Thus J. Katz and J. Fodor saw their goal as the reconstruction of “the speaker’s ability to interpret any of the infinitely many sentences of his language”[14].

Hence, generative semantics claims that the derivation of the sentence is a direct transformational mapping from semantics to surface structure. How and where lexical items enter the derivation was a topic of controversy.

Chart 2. The correlation of semantic representation and surface structures within generative semantics.

SEMANTIC REPRESENTATTION

LEXICON??????????

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