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Unit 29: Transformational and Phrase Structure Rules

noun, and sentence (3) “by a country road” too will be shown as a prepositional phrase (Prep + Notes
NP). Thus it would ignore semantic considerations and case relations.
(d) A PS grammar may provide misleading multiple descriptions. Consider, for example, the
following sentences :
(1) The dog’s barking is ferocious.
(2) Barking is good for the lungs of the dog.
(3) The dog is barking at the Stranger.
The word barking is an adjective in the first sentence, a noun in the second and a verb in the
third. The PS grammarian handling them will have to provide the information in different
ways. There ought to be a simpler way of describing barking in all these sentences.
(e) A PS grammar runs into difficulty in understanding remote relationships and in dealing with
discontinuous constituents, e.g.

(1) He is difficult to understand.
(2) He is difficult to live with
(3) John is easy to please.
(4) John is eager to please.
(5) He looked up the steet.
(6) He islloked the street up.
Thus a phrase structure grammar fails to capture various grammatical relations and functions
in more complex sentences.
Suppose we want to derive the following construction :
The clear, precise, insightful rule
by means of the PS grammar. We may end up with a phrase marker like the following
NP

DET ADJKT
THE ADJKT
ADJ 1
CLEAR ADJKT
ADJ 2
PRECISE
ADJ 3 N
INSIGHTFUL RULE
or, in the following manner :
NP

DET N CLEAR PRECISE INSIGHTFUL
ADJ RULE
(f) And the PS grammar fails to tell us which of these P-markers should be preferred by us. Despite
its formalism, we are left to apply our own intelligence. If we impose so many restrictions and
constraints on it, we fear it would become very cumbersome, complex, ad hoc and unelegant.
(g) Ambiguous sentences like, ‘Visiting linguists can be a nuisance’ or ‘Flying planes can be
dangerous’ can be explained only clumsily within the framework of phrase structure grammars,
because in such cases the ambiguity does not stem from a difference in immediate constituency.

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