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Unit 28: Transformational Generative Grammar

Transformational Notes
It is because of the shortcomings of phrase structure grammar and because of the other reasons that
Noam Chomsky came to hold the view that ‘notions of phrase structure are quite adequate for a
small part of the language and that the rest of the language can be derived by repeated application of
a rather simple set of transformations to the strings given by the phrase structure grammar to cover
the entire language directly, we would lose the simplicity of the limited phrase structure grammar
and of the transformational development.’
Simply speaking, a transformation can be thought of as the act of transforming one sentence into
another, the deep structure into surface structure. Whereas active sentences are ‘kernel’ sentences,
passives are the transforms. There are however plenty of other transformations. According to R.H.
Robins, “Essentially, transformation is a method of stating how the structures of many sentences in
languages can be generated or explained formally as the result of specific transformations applied to
certain basic sentence structures. These basic sentence types or structures are not necessarily basic or
minimal from the point of view of immediate constituent analysis, the transformational syntax
presupposes a certain amount of ‘phrases structure’ grammar of the immediate constituent type to
provide the basis or the ‘kernel’ from which transformations start”. (General Linguistics, Longmans,
1967 : 242), but the notion of “kernel’ has been abandoned by Chomsky since the publication of his
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965).
For example Has John seen Mary ? is a transform of John has seen Mary (by simple transfer of has
which is technically described as ‘permutation’ : A snake was killed by Mohan is the transform of
the sentence in the active voice : Mohan killed a snake (by passivization). Similarly The man who
was standing there ran away is the transformation of the two sentences.
The man ran away
and
The man standing there.
(by relative transformation)
Generative
The second characteristic of TG is that it is ‘generative’. This means that a grammar must ‘generate’
all and only the grammatical sentences of a language. By this is not meant that a grammar should
literally (at any time) bring all these sentences into existence. It means merely that grammar must be
so formulated that by following its rules and conventions we could produce all or any of the possible
sentences of the language. To ‘generate’ is thus to ‘predict’ what could be the sentences of the language
or to ‘specify’ precisely what are the possible sentences of the language. Thus a grammar should
‘generate’, ‘specify’, ‘predict’ the grammatical/acceptable sentences of the language and not the
ungrammatical/unacceptable ones.
So a generative grammar is not concerned with any ACTUAL set of sentences of the language but
with POSSIBLE set of sentences. We are not concerned merely or solely even primarily with any
observed sentences (utterances) that have occurred, but rather with those that can, or could have
occurred. The advocates of TG have said that any corpus has a finite number of sentences, no matter
how large, yet a language consists of an infinite number of sentences. This infinity is a result of what
is known as ‘recursion’— that we can apply the same linguistic device over again. To say that the
number of sentences is infinite does not mean, of course, that the grammar itself is infinite. On the
contrary, it has finite number of rules but allows to generate the infinite set of sentences.
Secondly, to say that a grammar is generative is to say that it is explicit, that is it explicitly, clearly,
methodically and accurately indicates just what are the possible sentences of the language. It leaves
nothing to chance, nothing to the reader’s intelligence or his knowledge of the language or the way in
which languages usually work. It should leave nothing to the imagination and should be formulated
step by step in such a way that the generation of the sentences of a language should be a pure
mechanical procedure. Even a person who did not know the language could generate sentences by
following the rules step by step.

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