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).

Transformations

Some of the rules of Transformational-Generative Grammar are quite simple, such as the Head Initial/Final rules:

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• Head Initial - the Head occurs before its argument.
• ate an apple (verb phrase)
• destruction of the city (noun phrase)
• on the floor (prepositional phrase)
• Head Final - the Head occurs after its argument.
• boldly go (verb phrase)
• the big white house (noun phrase)

Most languages tend to favor only one of these structures (there are exceptions). Japanese is a Head Final language, whereas English is a Head Initial language. Slightly more languages are Head Final.

Related Topics:
Japanese - English

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Other rules are more complex, such as the so-called "Wh-Question Formation Rule" for English, which can be summarized as:

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1. Begin with a simple declarative, with a missing item:

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• He gave X a book.

2. Insert the appropriate Wh-word for the expected lexical category of the answer:

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• He gave to whom a book.

3. Change the form of the verb to the appropriate "did X" construction:

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• He did give to whom a book.

4. Use Subject-Auxiliary Inversion to form an interrogative:

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• Did he give to whom a book?

5. Move the Wh-word element to the front of the sentence:

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• To whom did he give a book?

While Chomsky and others have abandoned much of traditional TGG (the mechanisms described in the example above have been out of date since the late 1960s), it continues to have useful applications in syntactic analysis and the study of children's language acquisition.

Related Topics:
1960s - Syntactic analysis - Language acquisition

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