Page 365 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 28: Transformational Generative Grammar

3. TWh-insertion Notes

When Pres can I see you

4. TAffix Attachment

can Pres
When I see you
can

Any deviations from this correct order will not produce the right result. Hence our proposition that
T-rules must be ordered, stands proved.
Some Possible Objections against TG
(1) The development of Chomskyan theory is still incomplete.
(2) The explications of his theory have been directed more towards pure-linguists, psychologists,
philosophers, mathematicians than towards teachers of English grammar.
(3) Criticisms of his theory by other linguists and modifications suggested by a few others have
generated more heat than light, and most teachers tend to reject the opportunity to be burned.
(4) There is a possibility of developing a pedagogical grammar based on TG, yet so far the results
have not been very conclusive.
(5) Despite Chomsky’s claim that TG is a simple grammar, students in general find it very complex
and difficult, and those who have little scientific and mathematical aptitude, find it still more
difficult.
(6) There are too many PS and T rules; there are problems of storing them.
(7) It too fails to capture certain meaning relations like the following :
This table polishes well.
This man polishes well.
(8) It cannot account for the social context of a sentence. Suppose an Indian clerk in an office asks
his officer in Hindi :
(a) Tu kahan gaya tha ? he may get a dismissal order, although he has not committed any
grammatical mistake. The only mistake he has committed is that he has not used an idiom
appropriate in the social context, that is, he has forgotten that he is talking to his officer
(boss) and not to his subordinate. Had he spoken :
(b) Aap kahan gaye the ? the matter could have been different. Grammatically both the
sentences (a) and (b) of Hindi are correct; semantically too both mean ‘where had you
gone ?’ yet they make a lot of difference to the speaker, a difference of life and death. Such
problems may not creep up so sharply in a model of English TG, but would surely haunt
when we go to make a Model of Hindi TG. So will be the case with Sanskrit.
(9) One particularly tricky question is the integration of meaning and syntax in deep structure.
Many linguists are coming to the conclusion that meaning should not be ‘tacked on’ to deep
structure syntax, but may even underline it at a still ‘deeper’ level. Others are proposing that
deep structure syntax may itself be far more abstract and less tangible than is suggested in
Chomsky’s writings.
(10) A very relevant point has been raised by Frank Palmer in his book Grammar (Pelican,). According
to Chomsky, the grammar consists of three components, the syntactic, the semantic and the
phonological. The syntactic component generated an infinite set of structures which are then
RELATED by the semantic and phonological components to meaning and sound. The syntactic
component is thus central and the semantic and phonological components are ‘purely
interpretive.’ We can illustrate the model as :

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