Transformational grammar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative
grammar (TGG), is a generative
grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a
Chomskyan tradition. Additionally,
transformational grammar is the Chomskyan tradition that gives rise to
specific transformational grammars.
Much current research in transformational grammar is inspired by
Chomsky's Minimalist Program.[1]
Contents
1 Deep structure and surface structure
2 Development of basic concepts
3 Innate linguistic knowledge
4 Grammatical theories
5 "I-Language" and "E-Language"
6 Grammaticality
7 Minimalism
8 Mathematical representation
9 Transformations
10 References
11 See also
12 External links
Deep structure and surface structure
In 1957, Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, in which he
developed
the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation —
a
deep structure and a surface structure.[2] [3] The deep structure
represented the
core semantic relations of a sentence, and was mapped on to the
surface
structure (which followed the phonological form of the sentence
very closely) via
transformations. Chomsky believed that there would be considerable
similarities
between languages' deep structures, 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 had been proposed prior to the
development of
deep structure as a means of increasing the mathematical and
descriptive power
of Context-free grammars. Similarly, deep structure was devised
largely for
technical reasons relating to early semantic theory. Chomsky
emphasizes the
importance of modern formal mathematical devices in the
development of
grammatical theory:
But the fundamental reason for [the] 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.
(Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, p. 8[ 2])
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Unsolved problems
Development of basic concepts
Though transformations continue to be important in Chomsky's
current theories,
he has now abandoned the original notion of Deep Structure and
Surface
Structure. Initially, two additional levels of representation were
introduced (LF
— Logical Form, and PF — Phonetic Form), and then in the 1990s
Chomsky
sketched out a new program of research known asMini malism, in
which Deep
Structure and Surface Structure no longer featured and PF and LF
remained as
the only levels of representation.
To complicate the understanding of the development of Noam
Chomsky's
theories, the precise meanings of Deep Structure and Surface
Structure have
changed over time — by the 1970s, the two were normally referred
to simply as
D-Structure and S-Structure by Chomskyan linguists. In particular,
the idea that the meaning of a sentence was
determined by its Deep Structure (taken to its logical conclusions by
the generative semanticists during the same
period) was dropped for good by Chomskyan linguists when LF took
over this role (previously, Chomsky and
Ray Jackendoff had begun to argue that meaning was determined
by both Deep and Surface Structure).[4][5]
Innate linguistic knowledge
Terms such as "transformation" can give the impression that
theories of transformational generative grammar
are intended as a model for the processes through which the human
mind constructs and understands sentences.
Chomsky is clear that this is not in fact the case: a generative
grammar models only the knowledge that
underlies the human ability to speak and understand. One of the
most important of Chomsky's ideas is that most
of this knowledge is innate, with the result that a baby can have a
large body of prior knowledge about the
structure of language in general, and need only actuallyl ear n the
idiosyncratic features of the language(s) it is
exposed to. Chomsky was not the first person to suggest that all
languages had certain fundamental things in
common (he quotes philosophers writing several centuries ago who
had the same basic idea), but he helped to
make the innateness theory respectable after a period dominated by
more behaviorist attitudes towards
language. Perhaps more significantly, he made concrete and
technically sophisticated proposals about the
structure of language, and made important proposals regarding how
the success of grammatical theories should
be evaluated.
Chomsky goes so far as to suggest that a baby need not learn any
actualrul es specific to a particular language at
all. Rather, all languages are presumed to follow the same set of
rules, but the effects of these rules and the
interactions between them can vary greatly depending on the values
of certain universal linguisticpar amete r s.
This is a very strong assumption, and is one of the most subtle
ways in which Chomsky's current theory of
language differs from most others.
Grammatical theories
In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relevant to the
construction and evaluation of grammatical
theories. The first was the distinction betweencompet enc e andper f or
mance. Chomsky noted the obvious fact
that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic
errors (e.g. starting a sentence and then
abandoning it midway through). He argued that these errors in
linguistic performance were irrelevant to the
study of linguistic competence (the knowledge that allows people to
construct and understand grammatical
sentences). Consequently, the linguist can study an idealised version
of language, greatly simplifying linguistic
analysis (see the "Grammaticalness" section below). The second
idea related directly to the evaluation of
theories of grammar. Chomsky made a distinction between
grammars which achieved descriptive adequacy and
those which went further and achieved explanatory adequacy. A
descriptively adequate grammar for a
particular language defines the (infinite) set of grammatical
sentences in that language; that is, it describes the
language in its entirety. A grammar which achieves explanatory
adequacy has the additional property that it
gives an insight into the underlying linguistic structures in the
human mind; that is, it does not merely describe
the grammar of a language, but makes predictions about how
linguistic knowledge is mentally represented. For
Chomsky, the nature of such mental representations is largely innate,
so if a grammatical theory has explanatory
adequacy it must be able to explain the various grammatical nuances
of the languages of the world as relatively
minor variations in the universal pattern of human language.
Chomsky argued that, even though linguists were
still a long way from constructing descriptively adequate grammars,
progress in terms of descriptive adequacy
would only come if linguists held explanatory adequacy as their goal.
In other words, real insight into the
structure of individual languages could only be gained through the
comparative study of a wide range of
languages, on the assumption that they are all cut from the same
cloth.
"I-Language" and "E-Language"
In 1986, Chomsky proposed a distinction betweenI-Language andE-
Language, similar but not identical to the
competence/performance distinction.[6] I-Language is taken to be
the object of study in linguistic theory; it is
the mentally represented linguistic knowledge that a native speaker
of a language has, and is therefore a mental
object — from this perspective, most of theoretical linguistics is a
branch of psychology. E-Language
encompasses all other notions of what a language is, for example
that it is a body of knowledge or behavioural
habits shared by a community. Thus, E-Language is not itself a
coherent concept[7], and Chomsky argues that
such notions of language are not useful in the study of innate
linguistic knowledge, i.e. competence, even though
they may seem sensible and intuitive, and useful in other areas of
study. Competence, he argues, can only be
studied if languages are treated as mental objects.
Grammaticality
Further information: Grammaticality
Chomsky argued that the notions "grammatical" and
"ungrammatical" could be defined in a meaningful and
useful way. In contrast an extreme behaviorist linguist would argue
that language can only be studied through
recordings or transcriptions of actual speech, the role of the linguist
being to look for patterns in such observed
speech, but not to hypothesize about why such patterns might
occur, nor to label particular utterances as either
"grammatical" or "ungrammatical". Although few linguists in the
1950s actually took such an extreme position,
Chomsky was at an opposite extreme, defining grammaticality in an
unusually (for the time) mentalistic way.[8]
He argued that the intuition of a native speaker is enough to define
the grammaticalness of a sentence; that is, if
a particular string of English words elicits a double take, or feeling
of wrongness in a native English speaker, it
can be said that the string of words is ungrammatical (when various
extraneous factors affecting intuitions are
controlled for). This (according to Chomsky) is entirely distinct from
the question of whether a sentence is
meaningful, or can be understood. It is possible for a sentence to be
both grammatical and meaningless, as in
Chomsky's famous example "colorless green ideas sleep furiously".
But such sentences manifest a linguistic
problem distinct from that posed by meaningful but ungrammatical
(non)-sentences such as "man the bit
sandwich the", the meaning of which is fairly clear, but which no
native speaker would accept as being well
formed.
The use of such intuitive judgments permitted generative
syntacticians to base their research on a methodology
in which studying language through a corpus of observed speech
became downplayed, since the grammatical
properties of constructed sentences were considered to be
appropriate data on which to build a grammatical
model. Without this change in philosophy, the construction of
generative grammars, when conceived of as a
some kind of representation of mental grammars, would have been
almost impossible at the time, since gathering
the necessary data to assess a speakers mental grammar would
have been prohibitively difficult.
Minimalism
In the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, much research in transformational grammar
was inspired by Chomsky's
M
inimalist Program.[9] The "Minimalist Program" aims at the further
development of ideas involving economy
of derivationand 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 worddogs can
only be used to refer to several
dogs, not a single dog, and so this inflection contributes to meaning,
making itint er pre tabl e. 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 thereforeunint er pr et able.
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
grammaticality.
Both notions, as described here, are somewhat vague, and indeed
the precise formulation of these principles is
controversial.[10][11] An additional aspect of minimalist thought is
the idea that the derivation of syntactic
structures should beunif or m; that is, rules should not be stipulated
as applying at arbitrary points in a
derivation, but instead apply throughout derivations. Minimalist
approaches to phrase structure have resulted in
"Bare Phrase Structure", an attempt to eliminate X-bar theory. In
1998, Chomsky suggested that derivations
proceed in "phases". The distinction of Deep Structure vs. Surface
Structure is not present in Minimalist theories
of syntax, and the most recent phase-based theories also eliminate
LF and PF as unitary levels of representation.
Mathematical representation
Returning to the more general mathematical notion of a grammar, an
important feature of all transformational
grammars is that they are more powerful than context free
grammars.[12] This idea was formalized by Chomsky
in the Chomsky hierarchy. Chomsky argued that it is impossible to
describe the structure of natural languages
using context free grammars.[13] His general position regarding the
non-context-freeness of natural language has
held up since then, although his specific examples regarding the
inadequacy of CFGs in terms of their weak
generative capacity were later disproven. [14] [15]
Transformations
The usual usage of the term 'transformation' in linguistics refers to a
rule that takes an input typically called the
Deep Structure (in the Standard Theory) or D-structure (in the
extended standard theory or government and
binding theory) and changes it in some restricted way to result in a
Surface Structure (or S-structure). In TGG,
Deep structures were generated by a set of phrase structure rules.
For example a typical transformation in TG is the operation of
subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI). This rule takes as its input a
declarative sentence with an auxiliary: "John has eaten all the
heirloom tomatoes." and transforms it into "Has John eaten all the
heirloom tomatoes?". In their original formulation (Chomsky 1957),
these rules were stated as rules that held over strings of either
terminals or constituent symbols or both.
X NP AUX Y
X AUX NP Y
(where NP = Noun Phrase and AUX = Auxiliary)
In the 1970s, by the time of the Extended Standard Theory, following
the work of Joseph Emonds on structure preservation,
transformations came to be viewed as holding over trees. By the
end of government and binding theory in the late 1980s,
transformations are no longer structure changing operations at all,
instead they add information to already existing trees by copying
constituents.
The earliest conceptions of transformations were that they were
construction-specific devices. For example,
there was a transformation that turned active sentences into passive
ones. A different transformation raised
embedded subjects into main clause subject position in sentences
such as "John seems to have gone"; and yet a
third reordered arguments in the dative alternation. With the shift
from rules to principles and constraints that
was found in the 1970s, these construction specific transformations
morphed into general rules (all the examples
j
ust mentioned being instances of NP movement), which eventually changed
into the single general rule of move
alpha or Move.
Transformations actually come of two types: (i) the post-Deep
structure kind mentioned above, which are string
or structure changing, and (ii) Generalized Transformations (GTs).
Generalized transformations were originally
proposed in the earliest forms of generative grammar (e.g. Chomsky
1957). They take small structures which are
either atomic or generated by other rules, and combine them. For
example, the generalized transformation of
embedding would take the kernel "Dave said X" and the kernel "Dan
likes smoking" and combine them into
"Dave said Dan likes smoking". GTs are thus structure building
rather than structure changing. In the Extended
Standard Theory and government and binding theory, GTs were
abandoned in favor of recursive phrase
structure rules. However, they are still present in tree-adjoining
grammar as the Substitution and Adjunction
operations and they have recently re-emerged in mainstream
generative grammar in Minimalism as the
operations Merge and Move.
References
^ Chomsky, Noam (1995). The Minimalist Program. MIT Press.
1.
^a b Chomsky, Noam (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press.
2.
^ The Port-Royal Grammar of 1660 identified similar principles; Chomsky,
Noam (1972). Language and
Mind. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
3.
^ Jackendoff, Ray (1974). Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. MIT
Press.
4.
^ May, Robert C. (1977). The Grammar of Quantification. MIT Phd
Dissertation. (Supervised by Noam
Chomsky, this dissertation introduced the idea of "logical form".)
5.
^ Chomsky, Noam (1986). Knowledge of Language. New York:Praeger.
6.
^ Chomsky, Noam (2001). "Derivation by Phase". In other words, in algebraic
terms, the I-Language is
the actual function, whereas the E-Language is the extension of this function. In
Michael Kenstowicz
(ed.) Ken Hale: A Life in Language. MIT Press. Pages 1-52. (See p. 49 fn. 2 for
comment on
E-Language.)
^ Newmeyer, Frederick J. (1986). Linguistic Theory in America (Second
Edition). Academic Press.
8.
^ Chomsky, Noam (1995). The Minimalist Program. MIT Press.
9.
^ Lappin, Shalom; Robert Levine and David Johnson (2000). "Topic ...
Comment". Natural Language &
Linguistic Theory18: 665–671. doi:10.1023/A:1006474128258.
10.
^ Lappin, Shalom; Robert Levine and David Johnson (2001). "The Revolution
Maximally Confused".
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory19: 901–919.
doi:10.1023/A:1013397516214.
11.
^ Peters, Stanley; R. Ritchie (1973). "On the generative power of
transformational grammars".
Information Sciences6: 49–83. doi:10.1016/0020-0255(73)90027-3.
12.
^ Chomsky, Noam (1956). "Three models for the description of language". IRE
Transactions on
Information Theory2: 113–124. doi:10.1109/TIT.1956.1056813.
13.
^ Shieber, Stuart (1985). "Evidence against the context-freeness of natural
language". Linguistics and
Philosophy8: 333–343. doi:10.1007/BF00630917.
14.
^ Pullum, Geoffrey K.; Gerald Gazdar (1982). "Natural languages and context-
free languages".
Linguistics and Philosophy4: 471–504. doi:10.1007/BF00360802.