Talk:Transformational grammar
OK, I've added a brief description of what a transformational grammar is, and a history of the development of these grammars from a Chomskyan point of view. It probably concentrates too much on Chomsky and DS/SS/LF/PF, but this just happens to be what I know something about. This really needs to be merged with the Transformational-generative grammar page. -- Cadr
- I've merged the article. The TGG page was really just a bunch of transformations, so I tagged it on to the end of this one. Dduck 17:52, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)
- Thanks :) -- Cadr
- I'm thinking about what to do with the "transformations" section. It's pretty good as it is, but it's rather out of synch with current thinking. On the other hand it should give simple examples, and it might be hard to bring in line with more current ideas in syntax without complicating it, so I dunno...My main problem with it is that it talks about particular rules (e.g. question forming rules) in the kind of way Chomsky would have talked about them 30-40 years ago. Now there are no construction-specific rules, so it's a little misleading. Anyone have any ideas? -- Cadr
The article says Chomsky argued that the intuition of a native speaker is enough to define the grammaticalness of a sentence; that is, if a native English speaker finds it difficult or impossible to understand a particular string of English words, it can be said that the string of words is ungrammatical [1]. ... [1] This is not entirely true; it is possible for a sentence to be both grammatical and meaningless, as in Chomsky's famous example "colourless green ideas sleep furiously". Such sentences are nonsensical in a very different way to (non-)sentences like "man the bit dog the"
Not only is the footnote right that the text in the body is not entirely true, the text in the body is actually wrong. Sensicality and grammaticality are nearly completely seperate. The footnote gives examples of both a nonsenical but grammatical sentence and a (more or less) sensical but ungrammatical sentence. Both types of example are incredibly easy to come up with in scores, because these attributes are not related.
It is the intuition of a native speaker which defines grammaticality, but their intuition of grammaticality, not meaning.
But I was reluctant to edit the body of the text because, someone else had already been reluctant to correct it, thus the footnote, plus I've been out of the Wikipedia loop for a while.
So if someone would like to a) refute my claim that the aritcle is wrong, b) fix the article themselves, or c) suggest whether I should correct the body of the article or just expand the footnote, I would appreciate it.
- Aidan Elliott-McCrea 17:03, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
- [This article concentrates heavily on Chomsky and Chomsky-related aspects of this topic. This is justifiable to some degree considering his importance in the field, but it would be nice to have a more balanced view.]
I removed the above from the text, because it's an editorial note, and even if true, belongs on the talk page. DanKeshet 23:43, May 10, 2004 (UTC)
Transformational Grammar
According to what I've read above, some maintainers of this page think what I'm about to suggest would complicate the issue, but the article says "the mechanisms described in the example above have been out of date since the late 1960s", and I would really like to know what the current theory is to explain the transformation from "He went there" to "Where did he go?" Maybe this query belongs here.
- The link at the end of the page gives a good introduction to (fairly) modern transformational theory. As can be seen by the length of it, it's not really feasible to go into the detail of the theory in an encyclopaedia article. Cadr
- I would like to give a detailed answer to this eventually, but for the moment I don't have a lot of time. I refer you to the article Lexical Functional Grammar, one of the "current" theories. The essential thing here is that current syntactical theory rejects that "deep structure" is a tree-structured sentence. For instance, while chomskyan syntax maps "Where did he go" to "He did go where?", LFG maps "Where did he go" to an attribute-value matrix. arj 20:42, 16 May 2004 (UTC)
LFG is nontransformational (as you explain), so it isn't really an example of current transformational theory. But I do like LFG — just being pedantic ;) The current(ish) transformational analysis of questions isn't actually all that different from the one given in the article. You start with:
- [CP [Spec 0] [C 0] [IP John [I did] [VP hit [DP who]]]] (partial structure only)
Then move I to C (subject auxilluary inversion):
- [CP [Spec 0] [C did] [IP John t [VP hit [DP who]]]]
Then move "who" to the front of the sentence (Spec-CP):
- [CP [Spec [DP who] [C did] [IP John t [VP hit t]]]
(I've used '0' to represent an empty node in the tree.) Subject-auxilluary inversion is justified by saying that C has a +Q (question) feature which needs to be checked by the dummy auxilliary "did" (after all, you wouldn't have that auxilliary in a non-question sentence, so it must be doing something). Movement of "who" is harder to explain. Basically, it gives you a representation with a quantifier and a variable, like in logic:
- for which X, John hit X
Hi all, I am not sure that the last discussion on this page (Revision as of 18:33, 24 Jun 2004 137.194.204.100: a discussion of Vygotsky's work in the middle of the section on minimalism) belongs where it has been put. Does anybody else agree with reverting to the previous version? I think this may have been a confusion on the part of the contributer (I've never heard such a direct link between ("Chomskyan") minimalism and Vygotsky before and don't think that this link should be present on this section on minimalism. AnandaLima 04:35, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I strongly disagree with this sentence:
- It is now generally accepted that it is impossible to describe the structure of natural languages using context free grammars (at least if these descriptions are to be judged on vaguely Chomskyan criteria).
Can anyone point me to sources for this extraordinary claim? Thanks, Burschik 11:55, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- It's certainly not extraordinary, it's just an element of Chomskyan orthodoxy which has gone relatively unchallenged. Even advocates of GPSG only (?) succeeded in using CFGs to describe natural languages by using metagrammars, complex feature systems and sophisticated semamtic rules, i.e. extensions to basic context free grammar. The empirical argument supporting the claim is very simple. Natural languages allow unbounded dependencies (e.g. in the sentence "Which man whose brother John used to go to school with likes muffins?", where the verb "likes" must agree in number with the phrase "which man") and CFGs (quite uncontroversialy) cannot by themselves deal with unbounded dependencies.
- Having said this, the efforts of GPSG and related theories probably mean that we should weaken the statement a little, perhaps to "widely agreed"? Cadr 18:22, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Hello, I am a Spanish wikipedian who has begun a stub in Wikibooks about the rules governing the language according to the Transformational grammar. All of you are welcome to participate on it. Thank you :) --Javier Carro 11:18, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)