Page 325 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 25: Transformational Rules: Application-Tree Diagrams

Formal definition Notes
Chomsky's advisor, Zellig Harris, took transformations to be relations between sentences such as
"I finally met this talkshow host you always detested" and simpler (kernel) sentences "I finally met
this talkshow host" and "You always detested this talkshow host". Chomsky developed a formal
theory of grammar where transformations manipulated not just the surface strings, but the parse
tree associated to them, making transformational grammar a system of tree automata.[4] This
definition proved adequate for subsequent versions including the `extended', `revised extended',
and `Government-Binding' (GB) versions of generative grammar, but may no longer be sufficient
for the current minimalist grammar in that merge may require a formal definition that goes
beyond the tree manipulation characteristic of Move?.

25.2 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 as Minimalism, 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).
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 actually learn 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.
Grammatical Theories
In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relevant to the construction and evaluation of
grammatical theories. The first was the distinction between competence and performance. 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
"Grammaticality" section below). The second idea related directly to the evaluation of theories of
grammar. Chomsky distinguished between grammars that achieve descriptive adequacy and those
that go 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

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