Transformational grammar

Transformational grammar is a broad term describing grammars (almost exclusively those of natural languages) that have been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. The term is usually synonymous with the slightly more specific transformational-generative grammar (TGG).

Deep structure and surface structure

In the early to mid 1960s, Noam Chomsky developed the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation - a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure was (more-or-less) a direct representation of the basic semantic relations underlying a sentence, and was mapped onto the surface structure (which followed the phonological form of the sentence very closely) via transformations. Chomsky believed that there would be considerable similarities between the Deep Structures of different languages, and that these structures would reveal properties, common to all languages, which were concealed by their Surface Structures. However, this was perhaps not the central motivation for introducing Deep Structure. Transformations themselves had been proposed prior to the development of Deep Structure, essentially as a means of increasing the mathematical and descriptive power of Context free grammars. Similarly, Deep Structure was devised largely for narrow technical reasons relating to early semantic theory. Chomsky emphasizes the importance of modern formal mathematical devices in the development of grammatical theory:

Related Topics:
1960s - Noam Chomsky - Deep structure - Surface structure - Semantic relations - Phonological - Context free grammars

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: But the fundamental reason for inadequacy of traditional grammars is a more technical one. Although it was well understood that linguistic processes are in some sense "creative", the technical devices for expressing a system of recursive processes were simply not available until much more recently. In fact, a real understanding of how a language can (in Humboldt's words) "make infinite use of finite means" has developed only within the last thirty years, in the course of studies in the foundations of mathematics.

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:(Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, p8)

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