Page 327 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 25: Transformational Rules: Application-Tree Diagrams

1. Economy of derivation is a principle stating that movements (i.e., transformations) only occur Notes
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 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.
2. 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.[11][12] 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. 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. 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. 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.

25.3 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-

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