The Transformational Grammar - Essay Example

Originally, transformational grammar and generative grammar was introduced by Zellig Harris. In the late 1951, he considered symbols to represent in the English sentences that are 'N' for Noun Phrase, 'V' for Verb, 'Vb' for copula verb, 'A' for adjective phrase and 'P' for particle. For surface structures, Harris later introduced Phrase Structure or PS rewrite system which is used to rewrite a symbol into a single or more than one symbols which are all selected from an alphabet. Therefore, following symbols came into view which restricts the English sentences: The above mentioned PS rewrite system is best known to be as an algorithmic machine.

The first in the symbols is S which represent sentence, when activated, the symbol of S is carried out linked with the associated rules. After sometime, Harris realized that PS write systems is not sufficient enough so after 1950, he began to see the study of Gardiner and Hjelmslev including the observational data of linguistic theory which did not contained the isolated sentences. In 1952, finally he applied distributional method to the texts which extended the area of sentences. However, transformational grammar was revolutionize.

Not starting from the minimal sounds, Chomsky began his work with syntactic combinations in which he analyzed that it can be generated by the means of a composite series of rules. In transformational grammar, each and every intelligible sentence not only conforms the grammatical rules to its own particular language but it also obey the rules for 'deep structures', a universal grammar that underlies the whole set of language plus corresponding to a natural capacity of the human mind (Farlex 2009).

The newly found linguistics, which started in 1957, deserves a label of "revolutionary". In this way the word "grammar" took an innovative meaning to itself. This new linguistics classified grammar as instinctive or a subconscious capability to produces language which constituted with our human language. However, the main aim of this new linguistic was to describe this sort of internal grammar (Norquist, Richard 2009). Chomsky along with other linguists, who helped to build the theory of transformational grammar, created transformational rules which help to transform a sentence with a given grammatical formation within a sentence merging it with dissimilar grammatical formation which has the same meaning.

For example, if the sentence would be "John say Mary" it will convert into "Mary was seen by Jonathan" (HighBeam 2009). According to Aronoff and Miller (2003), the initial work of Noam Chomsky largely illustrated insufficiency of context-free grammar for the study of natural languages as well as he provided explicit transformational descriptions of specific facts. Transformational grammarians, in 1960's, paid more attention to the connection amid the semantics and syntax which