Rajarata
University of Sri Lanka
Department of
Languages
Faculty of Social
Sciences and Humanities
Online Lectures
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Year and Semester
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Year-2 Semester-1
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Subject
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Syntax and Semantics
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Subject Code
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ENGL 2112
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Course Unit
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Transformational Generative Grammar-1
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Date
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07.05.2020
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Time
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Theory (11.00 am-12.00 am)
Practical (12.30 pm-2.30 pm)
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Lecturer
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D.N. Aloysius
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Theory Hours
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01
Total No of Hours: 03
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Practical Hours
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02
Total No of Hours: 06
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The
most significant development in linguistic theory and research in the 20th
century was the rise of generative grammar, and, more especially, of
transformational-generative grammar, or transformational grammar, as it came to
be known. Two versions of transformational grammar were put forward in the
mid-1950s, the first by Zellig S.
Harris and the second by Noam Chomsky, his pupil. It was Chomsky’s system that attracted the most
attention. As first presented by Chomsky in Syntactic Structures (1957), transformational
grammar can be seen partly as a reaction against post-Bloomfieldian
structuralism and partly as a continuation of it.
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 transformation to produce new
sentences from the existing ones.
Noam Chomsky's 1965 book Aspects of the
Theory of Syntax developed
the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation: a
deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure represents the
core semantic relations of a sentence and is mapped onto the surface structure. Converting
statements to questions or
active to passive voice act on the phrase markers to produce other
grammatically correct sentences.
He had adopted what he called a “mentalistic” theory of language, by which term he implied that the linguist should be concerned with the speaker’s creative linguistic competence and not his performance, the actual utterances produced. He had challenged the post-Bloomfieldian structural linguistics. This section is concerned mainly with a version of structuralism developed by scholars working in a post-Bloomfieldian tradition. This chapter will present an introduction to generative-transformational grammar which will illuminate the development of Noam Chomsky’s theories from the publication of his book Syntactic Structures in 1957 to the publication of his enlarged edition of Language and Mind in 1972. The new linguistics, which began in 1957 with the publication of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, deserves the label 'revolutionary.' After 1957, the study of grammar would no longer be limited to what is said and how it is interpreted. In fact, the word grammar itself took on a new meaning. The new linguistics defined grammar as our innate, subconscious ability to generate language, an internal system of rules that constitutes our human language capacity. The goal of the new linguistics was to describe this internal grammar.
Unlike the structuralists, whose
goal was to examine the sentences we actually speak and to describe their
systemic nature, the transformationalists wanted
to unlock the secrets of language: to build a model of our internal rules, a
model that would produce all of the grammatical and no ungrammatical sentences.
When it comes to syntax, Chomsky is famous for proposing that beneath every
sentence in the mind of a speaker is an invisible, inaudible deep structure,
the interface to the mental lexicon.
Practical Activity: Explain the Concept of Transformational
Generative Grammar with relevant examples.
References:
1.
Transformational Syntax by Andrew
Radford
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