Transformational syntax

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In linguistics, transformational syntax is a derivational approach to syntax that developed from the extended standard theory of generative grammar originally proposed by Noam Chomsky in his books Syntactic Structures and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax . [1] It emerged from a need to improve on approaches to grammar in structural linguistics.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves analysing language form, language meaning, and language in context. The earliest activities in the documentation and description of language have been attributed to the 6th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pāṇini who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī.

In linguistics, syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, usually including word order. The term syntax is also used to refer to the study of such principles and processes. The goal of many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all languages.

Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. Noam Chomsky first used the term in relation to the theoretical linguistics of grammar that he developed in the late 1950s. Linguists who follow the generative approach have been called generativists. The generative school has focused on the study of syntax and addressed other aspects of a language's structure, including morphology and phonology.

Contents

Particularly in early incarnations, transformational syntax adopted the view that phrase structure grammar must be enriched by a transformational grammar, with syntactic rules or syntactic operations that alter the base structures created by phrase structure rules. In more recent theories, including Government and Binding Theory but especially in Minimalism, the strong distinction between phrase structure and transformational components has largely been abandoned, with operations that build structure (phrase structure rules) and those that change structure (transformational rules) either interleaved, or unified under a single operation (as in the Minimalist operation Merge).

The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by Noam Chomsky as the term for grammar studied previously by Emil Post and Axel Thue. Some authors, however, reserve the term for more restricted grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy: context-sensitive grammars or context-free grammars. In a broader sense, phrase structure grammars are also known as constituency grammars. The defining trait of phrase structure grammars is thus their adherence to the constituency relation, as opposed to the dependency relation of dependency grammars.

In linguistics, the minimalist program (MP) is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky.

Phrase structure rules are a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language's syntax and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, being first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957. They are used to break down a natural language sentence into its constituent parts, also known as syntactic categories, including both lexical categories and phrasal categories. A grammar that uses phrase structure rules is a type of phrase structure grammar. Phrase structure rules as they are commonly employed operate according to the constituency relation, and a grammar that employs phrase structure rules is therefore a constituency grammar; as such, it stands in contrast to dependency grammars, which are based on the dependency relation.

Overview

According to the Chomskyan tradition, language acquisition is easy for children because they are born with a universal grammar in their minds. The tradition also distinguishes between linguistic competence, what a person knows of a language, and linguistic performance, how a person uses it. Finally, grammars and metagrammars are ranked by three levels of adequacy: observational, descriptive, and explanatory. A core aspect of the original Standard Theory is a distinction between two different representations of a sentence, called deep structure and surface structure. The two representations are linked to each other by a set of transformation rules, the totality of these rules is what constitute grammar, and what a grammatical description of a language should present. Under this theory, a speaker must have access to both structures to interpret an expression.

Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.

Universal grammar (UG) in linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that a certain set of structural rules are innate to humans, independent of sensory experience. With more linguistic stimuli received in the course of psychological development, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG. It is sometimes known as "mental grammar", and stands contrasted with other "grammars", e.g. prescriptive, descriptive and pedagogical. The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established, as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare. It is a matter of empirical investigation to determine precisely what properties are universal and what linguistic capacities are innate.

Linguistic competence is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speakers of a language. It is distinguished from linguistic performance, which is the way a language system is used in communication. Noam Chomsky introduced this concept in his elaboration of generative grammar, where it has been widely adopted and competence is the only level of language that is studied.

Under this model, syntax was placed in the center of linguistic research and sought to go beyond description. Scholars explored the formalism of syntax and psychology of grammar under this model. This led to more systematic research on linguistic data such as native speaker judgments and distinctions in grammaticality.

In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular speech variety. The notion of grammaticality rose alongside the theory of generative grammar, the goal of which is to formulate rules that define well-formed, grammatical, sentences. These rules of grammaticality also provide explanations of ill-formed, ungrammatical, sentences.

Many notable linguists have written on the topic, including Andrew Radford, [2] Rodney Huddleston, [3] and Roger Fowler. [4] Aspects of transformational syntax were revised or replaced under the Minimalist program. [5]

Andrew Radford (linguist) British linquist

Andrew Radford is a British linguist known for his work in syntax and child language acquisition. His first important contribution to the field was a 1977 book on Italian syntax. He achieved international recognition in 1981 for his book Transformational Syntax, which sold over 30,000 copies and was the standard introduction to Chomsky's Government and Binding Theory for many years; and this was followed by a best-selling introduction to transformational grammar in 1988, which sold over 70,000. He has since published several books on syntax within the framework of generative grammar and the Minimalist Program of Noam Chomsky.

Rodney D. Huddleston is a British linguist and grammarian specializing in the study and description of English.

Roger Fowler (1938–1999) was a world-renowned and long-serving British Linguist, and was professor of English and Linguistics at the University of East Anglia. He is well known for his works in stylistics. Together with Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress and Tony Trew, he authored the influential book Language and Control, which gave rise to the discipline of critical linguistics. He was educated at University College, London.

Non-transformational syntax

Non-transformational syntax describes competing models. The main non-transformational syntactic frameworks include head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical-functional grammar, categorial grammar, and simpler syntax. [6]

Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammar developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar, and it is the immediate successor to generalized phrase structure grammar. HPSG draws from other fields such as computer science and uses Ferdinand de Saussure's notion of the sign. It uses a uniform formalism and is organized in a modular way which makes it attractive for natural language processing.

Categorial grammar is a term used for a family of formalisms in natural language syntax motivated by the principle of compositionality and organized according to the view that syntactic constituents should generally combine as functions or according to a function-argument relationship. Most versions of categorial grammar analyze sentence structure in terms of constituencies and are therefore phrase structure grammars.

Related Research Articles

A syntactic category is a type of syntactic unit that theories of syntax assume. Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech, are syntactic categories. In phrase structure grammars, the phrasal categories are also syntactic categories. Dependency grammars, however, do not acknowledge phrasal categories.

In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations to produce new sentences from existing ones.

A noun phrase or nominal phrase is a phrase that has a noun as its head or shows the same grammatical function as such a phrase. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type.

Parse tree ordered, rooted tree that represents the syntactic structure of a string according to some context-free grammar

A parse tree or parsing tree or derivation tree or concrete syntax tree is an ordered, rooted tree that represents the syntactic structure of a string according to some context-free grammar. The term parse tree itself is used primarily in computational linguistics; in theoretical syntax, the term syntax tree is more common.

Lexical functional grammar (LFG) is a constraint-based grammar framework in theoretical linguistics. It posits two separate levels of syntactic structure, a phrase structure grammar representation of word order and constituency, and a representation of grammatical functions such as subject and object, similar to dependency grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to the theory of transformational grammar which was current in the late 1970s. It mainly focuses on syntax, including its relation with morphology and semantics. There has been little LFG work on phonology.

Government and binding is a theory of syntax and a phrase structure grammar in the tradition of transformational grammar developed principally by Noam Chomsky in the 1980s. This theory is a radical revision of his earlier theories and was later revised in The Minimalist Program (1995) and several subsequent papers, the latest being Three Factors in Language Design (2005). Although there is a large literature on government and binding theory which is not written by Chomsky, Chomsky's papers have been foundational in setting the research agenda.

In grammar, a complement is a word, phrase or clause that is necessary to complete the meaning of a given expression. Complements are often also arguments.

<i>Syntactic Structures</i> book by Noam Chomsky

Syntactic Structures is a major work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky. It was first published in 1957. It introduced the idea of transformational generative grammar. This approach to syntax was fully formal. At its base, this method uses phrase structure rules. These rules break down sentences into smaller parts. Chomsky then combines these with a new kind of rules called "transformations". This procedure gives rise to different sentence structures. Using this limited set of rules, Chomsky aimed to "generate" all and only the grammatical sentences of a given language, which are unlimited in number.

Logical Form of a linguistic expression is its mental representation derived solely from surface structure. This concept and term is used in some theories of syntax and grammar. In the words of Noam Chomsky, the Logical Form is "those aspects of semantic representation that are strictly determined by grammar, abstracted from other cognitive systems". It functions as the interface between grammar and conceptual-intentional properties of language, analogous to how the phonetic form is the interface between grammar and the audio-perceptual properties of utterances.

Merge is one of the basic operations in the Minimalist Program, a leading approach to generative syntax, when two syntactic objects are combined to form a new syntactic unit. Merge also has the property of recursion in that it may apply to its own output: the objects combined by Merge are either lexical items or sets that were themselves formed by Merge. This recursive property of Merge has been claimed to be a fundamental characteristic that distinguishes language from other cognitive faculties. As Noam Chomsky (1999) puts it, Merge is "an indispensable operation of a recursive system ... which takes two syntactic objects A and B and forms the new object G={A,B}" (p. 2).

Syntactic movement is the means by which some theories of syntax address discontinuities. Movement was first postulated by structuralist linguists who expressed it in terms of discontinuous constituents or displacement. Certain constituents appear to have been displaced from the position where they receive important features of interpretation. The concept of movement is controversial; it is associated with so-called transformational or derivational theories of syntax. Representational theories, in contrast, reject the notion of movement, often addressing discontinuities in terms of feature passing or persistent structural identities instead.

<i>Aspects of the Theory of Syntax</i> book by Noam Chomsky

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax is a book on linguistics written by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1965. In Aspects, Chomsky presented a deeper, more extensive reformulation of transformational generative grammar (TGG), a new kind of syntactic theory that he had introduced in the 1950s with the publication of his first book, Syntactic Structures. Aspects is widely considered to be the foundational document and a proper book-length articulation of Chomskyan theoretical framework of linguistics. It presented Chomsky's epistemological assumptions with a view to establishing linguistic theory-making as a formal discipline comparable to physical sciences, i.e. a domain of inquiry well-defined in its nature and scope. From a philosophical perspective, it directed mainstream linguistic research away from behaviorism, constructivism, empiricism and structuralism and towards mentalism, nativism, rationalism and generativism, respectively, taking as its main object of study the abstract, inner workings of the human mind related to language acquisition and production.

Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures (LGB) is a book by American linguist Noam Chomsky, published in 1981. It is based on the lectures Chomsky gave at the GLOW conference and workshop held at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy in 1979. In this book, Chomsky presented his government and binding theory of syntax. It had great influence on the syntactic research in early 1980s, especially among the linguists working within the transformational grammar framework.

References

  1. ↑ Akmajian, Adrian; Heny, Frank An Introduction To The Principles Of Transformational Syntax MIT Press, ISBN   9780262510226
  2. ↑ Radford, Andrew (1982). Transformational Syntax: A Student's Guide to Chomsky's Extended Standard Theory Cambridge University Press, ISBN   978-0521285742
  3. ↑ Huddleston, Rodney D. (1976). An Introduction to English Transformational Syntax. Longman, ISBN   9780582550629
  4. ↑ Fowler, Roger (1971). An Introduction to Transformational Syntax. Routledge & Kegan Paul, ISBN   9780389041528
  5. ↑ Stabler, Edward P. (2000). Minimalist grammars and recognition. Manuscript for the SFB340 workshop at Bad Teinach
  6. ↑ Borsley, Robert; Börjars, Kersti, eds. (2011). Non-Transformational Syntax: Formal and Explicit Models of Grammar . Wiley-Blackwell ISBN   978-0631209652
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