Le, H.T., Dang, D.T., & Tran, H.P.

– A Grammar of the English language

3.4. PHRASE STRUCTURES and TRANSFORMATIONAL

GRAMMAR

A good way of putting more information into an analysis would be to

name, or label, the constituents that emerge each time a sentence is
segmented; each label abbreviates a formal category. The approach that is
most widely practiced has developed its own abbreviations such as NP for
Noun Phrase, VP for Verb Phrase, S for Sentence, AP for Adjective Phrase,
PP for Preposition Phrase, and so on.

Phrase structure is the division of a sentence into parts, or constituents,

and the division of those constituents into subparts. For instance, the sentence
‘The bear went over the mountain’ is made up of two main constituents, ‘The
bear and went over the mountain’. The second constituent is, in turn divided
into two parts, went and over the mountain, which is divided even further, into
over and the mountain. All sentences have such hierarchical structure, even a
very simple two-word sentence like ‘Carol giggled’.

3.4.1. There are four ways to determine phrase structure:

One approach to determining phrase structure is a substitution test:

whatever you can substitute a single word for, preserving grammaticality, is a
constituent or phrase, that is, a ''chunk''; and whatever cannot be substituted
for is not. In The bear went over the mountain, we can easily find one-word
substitutions for the bear. As a result, we can have new sentences like ‘Max
went over the mountain’, ‘He went over the mountain’, ‘Tigers went over the
mountain’. The substitution need not preserve meaning, just grammaticality.
The new sentence created by the substitution can mean anything at all, but it
must be a grammatical sentence. The new sentences created by the
substitutions for The bear meet this test, so we can conclude that in the
original sentence The bear is a constituent.

Now let's look at some other word sequences in ‘The bear went over the
mountain’. How about bear went? There don't seem to be any single-word
substitutions for it. The results of substitutions such as smoke, green, it for
bear went aren't grammatical sentences; and since no substitution seems
possible for bear went, we can conclude that it isn't a constituent in ‘The bear

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went over the mountain’. Constituents can be longer than two words. For went
over the mountain in ‘The bear went over the mountain’ we can substitute any
single intransitive verb or any transitive verb whose direct object can be
optionally omitted: ‘The bear slept’, ‘The bear awoke’, ‘The bear ate’.

A second criterion for finding constituents is the ability of constituents to

‘move’: For ‘The bear went over the mountain’ we can ''move'' over the
mountain to the front position in the sentence: ‘Over the mountain the bear
went’. We can ''move'' a word sequence in a sentence when we can find a
paraphrase of the sentence which has the word sequence in a different place.
Note that the movement criterion, since it relies on paraphrase, requires
keeping the meaning the same, unlike the substitution criterion.

A third test for 'constituency' is whether the word sequence in the

sentence can be conjoined with a similar sequence. In The bear went over the
mountain, all constituents can be:

a. The bear and the moose went over the mountain.

b. The bear went over the mountain and came back again.
c. The bear went over the mountain and across the lake.
d. The bear went over the mountain and the pass.

A final criterion for constituency is whether the sequence in question can

be the antecedent for a pro-word (i.e., a pronoun or a word with a similar
function). It seems to be generally true that pro-forms can only use
constituents for their antecedents, never non-constituents. The technical term
for the relation between a pro-word (or, more generally, pro-expression) and
its antecedent is anaphora. All the constituents in The bear went over the
mountain can be justified under the anaphora test:
a. The bear went over the mountain. He was hungry.
b. The bear went over the mountain. He did so in order to see what was
on the other side.
c. The bear went over the mountain. He went there because he had a
strong drive to conquer new challenges.
d. The bear went over the mountain. In fact, he went back and forth
over it several times before he got tired of the scenery.

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Le, H.T., Dang, D.T., & Tran, H.P. – A Grammar of the English language

Phrasal categories are named according to the most important word of

the phrase. Noun Phrases (NPs) are so labeled because they typically contain
nouns - the exception: a Noun Phrase can be made up of just a pronoun. Verb
Phrases (VPs) always contain verbs. Adjective Phrases (APs) are so-called
because an adjective is the only required word; intensifiers are optional.
Prepositional phrases (PP) contain a preposition and an NP. With these labels,
‘The girl chased the dog’ and ‘The bear went over the mountain’ can be
displayed as tree diagrams:

S S
NP VP

NP VP DET N V PP

NP P NP
DET N V DET N DET N

The girl chased the dog The bear went over the mountain

However, grammarians are concerned to move beyond analyses of single

sentences to see whether their analyses work for other sentences in the
language. In Avram Noam Chomsky's approach, first outlined in Syntactic
Structures (1957), the jump from single-sentence analysis is made by devising
a set of rules that would ''generate'' tree structures such as the above. The
procedure can be illustrated using the following rules:

The girl chased the dog. The bear went over the mountain.
S => NP + VP S => NP + VP
VP => V + NP VP => V + PP
NP => DET + N PP => P + NP
V => chased NP => DET + N
DET => the V => went
N => girl, dog P => over
DET => the

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N => bear, mountain

Grammars that generate phrase structures in this way have come to be

called ''phrase structure grammars'' or PSGs. If we follow these rules through,
it can be seen that there is already a significant increase in the ''power'' of this
grammar over the single-sentence analysis used previously. If we choose the
girl for the first NP, and the dog for the second, we generate the girl chased
the dog; but if the choices are made the other way round, we generate the
sentence the dog chased the girl. By the simple device of adding a few more
words to the rules, suddenly a vast number of sentences can be generated:

V => chased, saw, hit . V => went, ran

..
DET => the, a
N => girl, man, bear
The girl chased the man
The man saw the bear
The bear hit the girl etc.
P => over, down
N => bear, tiger; mountain,
hill
The bear went over the hill
The tiger ran over the hill
The tiger ran down the hill
etc.

3.4.2. Transformational Grammar

In the mid-1960s work on the developing theory of transformational

grammar (or Transformational-Generative - TG) was perhaps coherent
enough for one to be able to talk of a school of transformational linguistics.
This is not possible today. Many who grew up within the model have gone on
to develop theories of their own, often in reaction to the current work of
Chomsky, and even among those who would describe themselves as
transformational linguists there is considerable divergence. That having been
said, many linguists adhere to some version of a grammar they would
describe as transformational and that owes its intellectual genesis to one or
other of the continually developing models offered by Chomsky. As for
Chomsky himself, his ideas continue to develop and in this part we will
concentrate discussion round one of Chomsky's most influential books:
Syntactic Structures (1957).

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In 1957, Avram Noam Chomsky, Professor of linguistics at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1928-..), published Syntactic
Structures, which proved to be a turning point in 20th century linguistics. The
first chapter of the book declared that grammar was an autonomous system,
independent of semantics (i.e., the meanings associated with the forms of the
language) and of the study of the use of language in situations, and
furthermore that it should be formalized as a system of rules which generate
an infinite set of sentences.

This approach contrasted sharply with the then fashionable orthodoxy

that believed that the application of appropriate procedures to a corpus
(plural: corpora - a body or collection of linguistic data for use in scholarship
and research, e.g.: samples in the forms of a collection of tape recordings) of
data would yield a grammatical description. Chomsky (1957) rejected the use
of a corpus, arguing that such corpora were inadequate because they could
provide only a tiny fraction of the sentences it is possible to say in a language;
they also contained many non-fluencies, changes of plan, and other errors of
performance (i.e., the actual use of a language in real situations.) Speakers
use their competence (i.e., a person's knowledge of the rules of a language) to
go far beyond the limitations of any corpus, by being able to create and
recognize novel sentences, and to identify performance errors. The
description of the rules governing the structure of this competence was thus
the more important goal.

It was mentioned above that Chomsky (1957) proposed that grammar

should be considered as an autonomous system, independent of semantic or
phonological systems, though, of course, bearing a relation to them.
Furthermore, he proposed that the syntax itself should consist of a number of
distinct but related levels, each of which is characterized by distinct rule types
and each of which bears a particular part of the descriptive burden. The two
most important are: the phrase-structure (see above) and transformational
components.
The phrase-structure component consists of a set of phrase-structure (PS)
rules which formalize some of the traditional insights of constituent-structure
analysis. Consider the following set of rules:
entence => NP + VP

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NP => DET + N + (Number)

Number => {sing, pl}

VP => Verb + NP
Verb => Aux + V
Aux => Tense
Tense => {pres, past}
DET => the
N => man, ball, etc.
V => hit, took, etc.
(items in brackets {} are alternatives, i.e., Number is either sing(ular) or
p(lura)l, Tense is either pre(sent) or past.)
Sentence

NP VP
DET N Number Verb NP

Sing. Aux. V DET N Number

Tense Sing

Past
the man hit the ball

Each rule is an instruction to rewrite the symbol on the left of the arrow
as the symbol or symbols on the right: informally, it can be construed as ''the
category on the left of the arrow has the constituent(s) specified on the right
of the arrow''. A derivation from this grammar can then be represented by the
tree shown above.

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Structures generated by the PS rules are referred to as underlying

structures. One small reason should be immediately apparent: the postulated
underlying structure shown above is characterized by a degree of abstraction.
The NPs are analyzed as containing a marker of number, and the analysis of
the verb form hit as a past-tense form is shown by postulating an element,
''Tense'', preceding the verb itself. None of these items has an overt realization
in the actually occurring form of the sentence. The reason:

PS rules of this kind can be elaborated to capture certain basic facts

about the grammar of English: facts about constituency, that strings like the
man are and those like man hit are not proper constituents of the sentence (see
above); facts about the sub-categorization of lexical items, e.g., a transitive
verb like hit requires to be followed by an NP; facts about functional relations
like subject, object, and main verb.

The transformational component consists of rules which perform a

variety of functions. Some of them are rules which relate particular sentence
types to each other, as active sentences to their passive counterparts; rules that
account for morphological operations of various kinds, like number
agreement between subject and verb; rules that are responsible for generating
complex sentences. A transformational rule is a rule which maps one
syntactic-analysis tree into another. If PS rules can be informally thought of
as instructions to build up structures like those above (the man hit the ball),
then a transformational rule can be informally thought of as an instruction to
change one structure into another.

Thus, transformational rules enable the grammar to show the relationship

between sentences that have the same meaning but are of different
grammatical form. The link between active and passive sentences, for
example, can be shown - such as ‘the man hit the ball’ (active) and ‘the ball
was hit by the man’ (passive). The kind of formulation needed to show this is:

NP1 + V + NP2 => NP2 + Aux + V-en + by + NP1

which is an economical way of summarizing all the changes you would

have to introduce, in order to turn the first sentence into the second. If this

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formula were to be translated into English, four separate operations would be

recognized:
(i) The first noun phrase in the active sentence (NP1) is placed at the
end of the passive sentence.
(ii) The second noun phrase in the active sentence (NP2) is placed at
the beginning of the passive sentence.
(iii) The verb (V) is changed from past tense to past participle (V-en),
and an auxiliary verb (Aux) is inserted before it.
(iv) A particle by is inserted between the verb and the final noun
phrase.
(This rule will generate all regular active-passive sentences.)

As mentioned above, in subsequent development of generative grammar,

many kinds of transformational rules came to be used, and the status of such
rules in a grammar has proved to be controversial. Recent generative
grammars look very different from the model proposed in Syntactic
Structures. But the fundamental conception of sentence organization as a
single process of syntactic derivation remains influential, and it distinguishes
this approach from those accounts of syntax that represent grammatical
relations using a hierarchy of a separate ranks.

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