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).

Minimalism

Much current research in transformational grammar is inspired by Chomsky's Minimalist Program, outlined in his book The Minimalist Program (1995). The new research direction involves 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 TGG 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 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 grammatical number 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 grammaticalness (note that this does not rule out complex sentences in general, only sentences that have superfluous elements in a narrow syntactic sense). Both notions, as described here, are somewhat vague, and indeed the precise formulation of these principles is a major area of controversy in current research. 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. For this reason, Deep Structure and Surface Structure are not present in Minimalist theories of syntax. Minimalism in the sense described here has no philosophical association with Minimalism, the artistic and cultural movement.

Related Topics:
Inflection - Grammatical number - Minimalism

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