Page 371 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 28: Transformational Generative Grammar

component is a series of syntactic statements concerning sentence, clause, phrase, and word level Notes
structures. The lexicon lists the formal units of language. The phonological component gives the
phonemic sentence a phonetic realization in the language.
Pike rejected the idea that the minimum unit of grammar was a sentence, but recommended a
hierachical order and labelling. The Tagmemic grammar has three semi-autonomous but interlocking
levels or models. They are as mentioned above, phonology, grammar and lexicon. It stresses the
hierarchical ordering of grammatical units into ranks of levels—morphemes, words, phrases, clauses,
sentences, paragraphs, and discourses. Since a sentence can function as a clause and vice versa, it
also adopts Halliday’s concepts of rank shifting.
Immediate Constituent Analysis of the structuralists insists just on biniary (two) cuts; but Tagmemics
always goes in favour of string constituent analysis, and can have many cuts.
SENTENCE A
4 1 3 5 6 2
THE BOY ATE ALL HIS CANDY YESTERDAY

Tagmemics, unlike a structural analysis, probes or analyses the function of the categories and not
merely their naming. It is a ‘slot and filler’ grammar. A slot is a position in a construction frame. The
filler class is the list of all the items that can fill the functional slot. And a tagmeme is the correlation
between a grammatical function like ‘subject’ and the class of fillers like nouns that can fill that
function. But neither the slot nor the filler in itself is important; it is tagmeme which is significant.
The slot is the function; the filler is the category. We can have sub-slots also. A tagmeme, therfore, is
the correlation of a slot and the class of items which can occur in that slot. Hence we can have
sentence level tagmemes
clause level tagmemes
phrase level tagmemes
word level tagmemes, and
morpheme level tagmemes
Sentence A has the following Tagmemes
(1) BASE : transitive clause—Intonation Tagmeme
T : cl INT : F
(2) Clause Level Tagmeme
S : NP + Pr : tv + O : n + - Temporal Adverb
(3) Phrase Level Tagmeme
Det : det + H : n
. . .
(4) Word Level Tagmeme
ate—Nuc : Verb stem + Tense : past
.
.
.
(5) Morpheme level tagmeme eat
. . .
In this same way, the sentence : She likes toys consists of three tagmemes— the ‘subject’ slot filled by
a pronoun, the ‘Predicate’ slot filled by a transitive verb, and the ‘Object’ slot filled by noun. It can be
represented formulatically as :
S : pn + P : tv + O : n,

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