Transformational
Grammar by: Noam Chomsky
1. Transformational
grammar • device for generating sentences in a language. • It generates only
the well-formed or grammatically correct sentences of a language since it is
meant to create the rules and principles which are in the mind or brain of a
native speaker
2. • Noam
Chomsky believed that grammar has recursive rules allowing one to generate
grammatically correct sentences over and over. • Our brain has a mechanism
which can create language by following the language principles and grammar
3. •
Transformational Process of the Syntactic Structures according to Chomsky‟s
Transformational Grammar can be best summarized by adding, deleting, moving,
and substituting of words. These changes take place through specific rules,
which are called Transformational Rules.
4. Generally,
any sentence structure contains a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP).
5. In the
sentence: “Vicki laughed.” „Vicki‟ is a NP and „laughed‟ is a VP. The sentence
could change to: “The woman laughed.” „The woman‟ is the NP and „laughed‟ is
the VP. You can extend the sentence to: “Vicki who lives near me laughed.”
“Vicki who lives near me” is the NP; “laughed” is the VP. Expanding the
sentence, “Vicki who lives near me laughed loudly” The NP consists of “Vicki
who lives near me” and the VP is “laughed loudly.”
6. Deep and
Surface structure • Deep structures are the input to the semantic component,
which describes their meaning. • Surface structures are the input to the
phonological component, which describes their sound. • In short, deep structure
determines meaning, surface structure determines sound.
7. The
helical line connecting deep structure to surface structure represents the
transformational cycle introduced in Chomsky ( 1965) .
8. This
model has three essential characteristics. • First , the meaning, or semantic
interpretation , of a sentence is determined from its deep structure . • Second
, the pronunciation , or phonetic interpretation , of a sentence is determined
from its surface structure . • And third , the role of transformations is seen
as converting the semantically relevant level of linguistic description into
the phonetically relevant level
9. Innate
linguistic knowledge Empiricists Rationalists mind as a tabula rasa containing
no knowledge prior to experience and placing no constraints on the forms of
possible knowledge, except that they must be derived from experience by such
mechanisms as the association of ideas or the habitual connection of stimulus
and response (all knowledge comes from human beings have knowledge that is not
derived from experience but is prior to all experience and determines the form
of the knowledge that can be gained from experience (knowledge is implanted
innately experience and prior to experience)
10. Chomsky‟s view • The
information that the child is presented with—when other people address him or
when he hears them talk to each other—is limited in amount, fragmentary, and
imperfect. There seems to be no way the child could learn the language just by
generalizing from his inadequate experiences, from the utterances he hears.
Furthermore, the child acquires the language at a very early age, before his
general intellectual faculties are developed.
11. Indeed, the ability to learn a
language is only marginally dependent on intelligence and motivation—stupid
children and intelligent children, motivated and unmotivated children, all
learn to speak their native tongue. If a child does not acquire his first
language by puberty, it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, for him to learn
one after that time. Formal teaching of the first language is unnecessary: the
child may have to go to school to learn to read and write but he does not have
to go to school to learn how to talk.
12. The child has a universal
grammar, so to speak, programmed into his brain as part of his genetic
inheritance. In the most ambitious versions of this theory, Chomsky speaks of
the child as being born "with a perfect knowledge of universal grammar,
that is, with a fixed schematism that he uses,…in acquiring language." A
child can learn any human language on the basis of very imperfect information.
That being the case, he must have the forms that are common to all human
languages as part of his innate mental equipment.
13. • One traditional argument
against the existence of an innate language learning faculty is that human
languages are so diverse. The differences between Chinese, Nootka, Hungarian,
and English, for example, are so great as to destroy the possibility of any
universal grammar, and hence languages could only be learned by a general
intelligence, not by any innate language learning device. Chomsky has attempted
to turn this argument on its head: In spite of surface differences, all human
languages have very similar underlying structures; they all have phrase
structure rules and transformational rules. They all contain sentences, and
these sentences are composed of subject noun phrases and predicate verb
phrases, etc.
14. Grammatical theories • In the 1960s, Chomsky
introduced two central ideas relevant to the construction and evaluation of
grammatical theories.
16. Linguistic Performance • Chomsky noted the obvious
fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors
(e.g., starting a sentence and then abandoning it midway through). He argued
that these errors in linguistic performance were irrelevant to the study of
linguistic competence
17. Linguistic Competence • the
knowledge that allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences
18. Grammaticality • -correctness in terms of grammar . •
It is possible for a sentence to be both grammatical and meaningless. Colorless
green ideas sleep furiously.(Chomsky)…
19. Grammaticality • Meaningful but ungrammatical
(non)sentences • Man the bit sandwich the. • The meaning of which is fairly
clear, but no native speaker would accept as well formed.
21.Minimalism • "Minimalist Program" aims at
the further development of ideas involving economy of derivation and economy of
representation
22. Economy of derivation • a
principle stating that movements (i.e., transformations) only occur in order to
match interpretable features with uninterpretable features.
23 Economy of derivation • the plural inflection on
regular English nouns, e.g.,dogs. The word dogs can only be used to refer to
several dogs, not a single dog, and so this inflection contributes to meaning,
making it interpretable. English verbs are inflected according to the number of
their subject (e.g., "Dogs bite" vs "A dog bites"), but in
most sentences this inflection just duplicates the information about number
that the subject noun already has, and it is therefore uninterpretable.
24. Economy of representation • the principle that
grammatical structures must exist for a purpose, i.e., the structure of a
sentence should be no larger or more complex than required to satisfy
constraints on grammaticality.
25..."I-Language"
and "ELanguage" I-Language (Internal language) E-Language (External
language) the linguistic knowledge that is in the mind of the speaker
observable linguistic output (sentences, songs, texts etc.) Every fluent
individual in a language community has an ILanguage. As such, every individual
can produce a potentially infinite E-Language. E-Language is thus
epiphenomenal; it is the result of I-Language.
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