Saturday, May 30, 2020

Rajarata University of Sri Lanka Year-2 Semester-1

Rajarata University of Sri Lanka

Department of Languages

Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities

Online Lectures

Year and Semester	Year-2 Semester-1
Subject	Syntax and Semantics
Subject Code	ENGL 2112
Course Unit	Transformational Generative Grammar-2
Date	08.05.2020
Time	Theory (11.00 am-12.00 am) Practical (12.30 pm-1.30 pm)
Lecturer	D.N. Aloysius
Theory Hours	01 Total No of Hours: 04
Practical Hours	01 Total No of Hours: 04

Transformational Generative Grammar

In the 1950s, the school of linguistic thought known as transformational-generative grammar (TGG) received wide acclaim through the works of Noam Chomsky . Chomsky postulated a syntactic base of language (called deep structure), which consists of a series of phrase-structure rewrite rules, i.e., a series of (possibly universal) rules that generates the underlying phrase-structure of a sentence, and a series of rules (called transformations) that act upon the phrase-structure to form more complex sentences. The end result of a transformational-generative grammar is a surface structure that, after the addition of words and pronunciations, is identical to an actual sentence of a language. All languages have the same deep structure, but they differ from each other in surface structure because of the application of different rules for transformations, pronunciation, and word insertion. Another important distinction made in transformational-generative grammar is the difference between language competence (the subconscious control of a linguistic system) and language performance (the speaker's actual use of language). Although the first work done in transformational-generative grammar was syntactic, later studies have applied the theory to the phonological and semantic components of language.

Using a term such as "transformation" may give the impression that theories of transformational generative grammar are intended as a model for the processes through which the human mind constructs and understands sentences, but Chomsky clearly stated that a generative grammar models only the knowledge that underlies the human ability to speak and understand. Arguing that because most of that knowledge is innate, a baby can have a large body of prior knowledge about the structure of language in general and so need to learn only the idiosyncratic features of the language(s) to which it is exposed.

Chomsky is not the first person to suggest that all languages had certain fundamental things in common. He quoted philosophers who posited the same basic idea several centuries ago. Chomsky helped to make the innateness theory respectable after a period dominated by more behaviorist attitudes towards language. He made concrete and technically sophisticated proposals about the structure of language as well as important proposals regarding how the success of grammatical theories should be evaluated.

Chomsky argued that the notions "grammatical" and "ungrammatical" could be defined in a meaningful and useful way. In contrast, an extreme behaviorist linguist would argue that language can be studied only through recordings or transcriptions of actual speech and that the role of the linguist is to look for patterns in such observed speech but not to hypothesize about why such patterns might occur or to label particular utterances as either "grammatical" or "ungrammatical". Although few linguists in the 1950s actually took such an extreme position, Chomsky was on the opposite extreme, defining grammaticality in an unusually mentalistic way (for the time). He argued that the intuition of a native speaker is enough to define the grammaticality of a sentence; that is, if a particular string of English words elicits a double take or the feeling of wrongness in a native English-speaker, with various extraneous factors affecting intuitions are controlled for, it can be said that the string of words is ungrammatical. That, according to Chomsky, is entirely distinct from the question of whether a sentence is meaningful or can be understood. It is possible for a sentence to be both grammatical and meaningless, as in Chomsky's famous example, "colorless green ideas sleep furiously". However, such sentences manifest a linguistic problem that is distinct from that posed by meaningful but ungrammatical (non)-sentences such as "man the bit sandwich the", the meaning of which is fairly clear, but which no native speaker would accept to be well formed.