general principles of transformational grammar but have challenged Chomsky's conception of deep structure

as a separate and identifiable level of syntactic representation. In their opinion, the basic component of the grammar should consist of a set of

rules for the generation of wellformedsemantic representations. These would then be converted by a succession of transformationalru les into strings of

words with an assigned surfacestructure syntactic analysis, there being no place in the passage from semantic representation to surface structure

identifiable as Chomsky'sdeep structure. Chomsky himself has denied that there is any real difference between the two points of view

and has maintained that the issue is purely one of notation. That this argument can be put forward by one party to the controversy and

rejected by the other is perhaps a sufficientindicatio n of the uncertainty of the evidence. Of greater importance than the overt issues, in so far as

they are clear, is the fact that linguists are now studying much more intensively than they havein the past the complexities of the interdependence of

syntax, on the one hand, and semantics andlogic, on the other. Whether it will prove possible to handle all these complexities

within acomprehensive generative grammar remains to be seen.The role of the phonological component of a generative

grammar of the type outlined byChomsky is to assign a phonetic "interpretation" t o the strings of w ords generated by thesyntactic component. These

strings of words are represented in a phonological notation (takenfrom the le xicon) and have been provided w ith a surfacestructure analysi

s by thetransform ational rules (seeFigure 7 ). The phonological elements out of which the word forms arecomposed are

segments consisting of what are referred to technically as distinctive features(following the usage of the Prague school, see below

The Prague school ). For example, the wordform "man," represented phonologically, is composed of three segments: the first consists of

thefeatures [+ consonantal], [+ bilabial], [+ nasal], etc.; the second of the features [+ vocalic], [+front], [+ open], etc.; and the third of the

features [+ consonantal], [+ alveolar], [+ nasal], etc.(These features should be taken as purely illustrative; there is some doubt about the

definitive listof distinctive features.) Although these segments may be referred to as the "phonemes" /m/, /a/,and /n/, they should not be

identified theoretically with units of the kind discussed in the sectionon Phonology under Structural linguistics.

They are closer to what many American structurallinguists called "morphophoneme s" or the Prague school linguists labelled

"archiphonemes," being unspecified for any feature that is contextually redundant or predictable. For instance, thefirst segment of the phonological

representation of "man" will not include the feature [+ voice];

TRANSFORMATI ONAL GRAMMAR_Task. rtf arranged by Ach. Philip, S.Pd

17 because nasal consonants are always phonetically voiced in this position in English, the

feature[+ voice] can be added to the phonetic specification by a rule of the phonological component.One further important aspect of

generative phonology ( i.e., phonology carried out withinthe framework of an integrated generative grammar) should

be mentioned: its dependence uponsyntax. Most American structural phonologists made it a point of principle that the phonemicanalysis

of an utterance should be carried out without regard to its grammatical structure. This principle was controversial among American linguists and was

not generally accepted outsideAmerica. Not only has the principle been rejected by the generative grammarians, but they

havemade the pho nological descript ion of a language much more depen dent upon its syntacticanalysis than has any other school of li nguists. They

have claimed, for example, that the phonological rules that assign different degrees of stress to the vowels in English words and phrases and a

lter the quality of the relatively unst ressed vowel con comitantly must makereference to the derived constituent structure of sentences and not

merely to the form class of theindividual words or the places in which the word boundaries occur
TRANSFORMATI ONAL

GRAMMAR_Task. rtf arranged by Ach. Philip, S.Pd

18

References
1.Boey, Lim Kiat. (1975).

An Introduction to Linguistics for The Language Teacher. Singapore. Singapore University Press.2.Yule, Ge orge.

The Study of Language: An Introduction. Sydney. Cambridge UniversityPress.3. Jacobs, Roderick A. et al.

English Transformational Grammar. John Wiley and Sons. New York. 4.From Wikipedia , the free encyclopedia, Inte rnet