Transformational

Grammar
Some central aspects of the
“ Chomskyan Revolution”
in American linguistics
 Some signs of revolutionary struggle

Sklar:
“what has happened in linguistics since Chomsky appeared on the

scene almost perfectly fits Kuhn’s description of how a scientific

revolution works.
 Some signs of revolutionary struggle
After Chomsky's revolution, there were two main camps in the field of
linguistics:

Transformationalist Camp (Chomskyan)

Structuralist Camp (Pre – Chomskyan)

 Some signs of revolutionary struggle
Dewring discussed the main issues of this revolution under the following
categories:

 On the nature of language

 On the purpose of language description

 On the data of linguists

 On the nature of language

Before Chomsky a typical old-school of language was:

“the totality of utterances that can be made in a speech-community is

the language of that speech community” (Bloomfield,1926)

 On the nature of language
the totality of utterances that can be made in a speech-community is the“
language of that speech community” (Bloomfield,1926)
utterance
”an act of speech “

speech community “ a community in which successive

utterances are alike or partly alike”

The only reasonably clear aspect of Bloomfiled’s definition thus appears to be his decision to
regard a language as a “totality” of something (namely, utterances).
 On the nature of language

In short, in the pre Chomskyan era, language was considered as a mass

(corpus) of regularized speech

 On the nature of language
To transformationalists, it was untenable to consider language as a
collection of utterances. They proposed that if language is a collection of
utterances, then:

 What does it mean to learn a language?

 What is it that is lost when one suffers from any types of aphasic
disorders?
 On the nature of language
According to TGG, the fundamental fact that must be considered about
.human languages is the innovative aspect of them

A native speaker of a language is able to comprehend an immense

.number of sentences that has never heard before
 On the nature of language
Concerning language acquisition, within the domain of TGG, it is believed that what a
.child acquires is a set of general principles independent form vocabulary

these principles are not ready-made-formulations but a way of constructing

.formulations

In TGG, language is not seen as conglomeration of speech acts and it is seen instead as
.an abstract system of organizing principles which underlies these acts
 On the nature of language
According to Derwing the distinction between the language as a system
and data which manifest that system is very much the same as the
.familiar distinction between langue and parole
System Data
Langue Parole
Learning Performance
 On the nature of language
Derwing mentioned that in TGG,
“ language shall no longer be regarded as a corpus of utterances per se ,
but rather as the abstract system of rules which underlies these
utterances.”
 On the purpose of linguistics

Accompanying the radical change in the way that language was viewed,
radical change in the interpretation regarding the ultimate purpose of
linguistic description or analysis was also observed in TGG.
 On the purpose of linguistics

Before TGG, the main goal of linguistic analysis was to achieve a

categorization and simplification of linguistic utterances by a process of
identifying and “factoring out” recurrent entities so as to yield an
abstract set of utterance-types into which all the utterances of a
.language could conveniently be classified
 On the purpose of linguistics
Attention focused on the development of explicit data-analytical
procedures (or ways of arranging the original data) which could
guarantee the desired level of objectivity by only dealing with the formal
distinctions extant in languages (as opposed to the semantic distinctions
so commonly employed by traditional grammarians).
 On the purpose of linguistics
If the desired level of objectivity could be achieved, the resulting
linguistic description of each language might then be regarded as
.”reliable “summary of the behavior of native speakers

Finally, a whole language is reduced to a more manageable “contracted

.”form
 On the purpose of linguistics
Transformationalists argued that the whole effort was misguided from
.the very beginning

In TGG, it was claimed that a structural linguistic description was

.nothing more than a taxonomic classification
 On the purpose of linguistics
Transformationalists proposed that we should look to the natural
.sciences or the philosophy of science

Science is typically concerned with data not for itself but as evidence for
deeper, hidden organizing principles that cannot be detected “in the
phenomena” nor derived from them by taxonomic data-processing
.operations
 On the purpose of linguistics
A scientific discipline is characterized by the introduction of abstract
constructs in theories and validation of those theories by testing their
.predictive power

.A scientist put forward theories and test those theories

On the purpose of linguistics
?What is there to theorize about in linguistic

.The nature of language itself

 On the purpose of linguistics
Chomsky proposed that linguists should regard a grammar (linguistic
description) not as a classification of utterances, but rather as a
.theory of language

Chomsky believed that a grammar should be regarded as “hypothesis

concerning this internalized system
 On the purpose of linguistics
Chomsky insisted that a fundamental distinction must be made between
competence (the speaker-learner knowledge of his language) and
.performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations)

A language theory is concerned with ideal speaker-listener who is

unaffected by grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory
.limitations, distractions and errors
 On the purpose of linguistics
The main shortcoming of the structuralist era was its total failure “to
”come to grips with the creative aspect of language use

Rather than trying to advance hypotheses to account for this ability,

structuralists contented themselves with the formulation of
”“procedure for segmentations and classification
 On the purpose of linguistics

Transformationalists proposed to substitute the notion of list (or

inventory of elements) with grammatical rule (in terms of these rules,
.the real regularities of a language might be explicitly formulated)
 On the purpose of linguistics
Halle stated that “a complete scientific description of language must
pursue one aim above all: to make precise and explicit the ability of a
native speaker to produce utterances in that language”.
 On the purpose of linguistics
This new criterion of explicitness brings to light another fatal
.shortcoming of the structuralist age

Chao put forward the title of “non-uniqueness” and mentioned that

“different systems or solutions are not simply correct or incorrect, but
”.may be regarded only as being good or bad for various purposes
 On the purpose of linguistics
No linguist of the structualist era could suppose that he had written a
.“God’s Truth” grammar

Just as the purpose of writing a linguistic description might vary, it is

.certain that our grammar will vary also
 On the purpose of linguistics
Comparing with physics, it would be as absurd as if a physicist set forth
a new mathematical law as simply “one possible way” of looking at
.the phenomena

In science it is truth which is at issue, not convenience

 On the purpose of linguistics

Within the structuralist era, linguistic theory became equated with “ the

set of techniques used by field linguist to arrive at a description of a

language”
 On the purpose of linguistics

To sum up, the principles of the structural analysis are arbitrary and “

there are radical inadequacies in the formulation of the goals of a field

whose methods are arbitrary”

 On the purpose of linguistics
In TGG, the question of justification of grammar is handled as in other
.sciences

We justify a grammar by showing that it is the simplest theory, capable of

.explaining all the facts

Two important notions of Simplicity and Explaining are mentioned in the

.above statement
 On the purpose of linguistics

Caws defined scientific explanation as “accounting for particular events

by reference to general laws … or accounting for laws by reference to

”principles still more general

 On the purpose of linguistics
In short, a particular fact or event is constructed to be explained, in the
scientific sense, if it can be shown to be subsumed under a broader
generalization, i.e. if it can be proved to be a special case of, or logical
consequence of, some more general statement which accounts for a great
number of other apparently heterogeneous facts as well.
 On the purpose of linguistics

By the same token, Chomsky stated that “certain features of given

languages can be reduced to ‘universal properties of language’ and

explained in terms of these deeper aspects of linguistic form”.

 On the purpose of linguistics

Chomsky and Halle thus interpret a major goal of general linguistics to

propose a system of hypotheses concerning the essential properties of

any human language.

 On the purpose of linguistics

The role of explanation in the justification of grammars is thus clear: we

accept a grammar which explains some complex of linguistic

.phenomena in preference to one which simply restates the facts

 On the purpose of linguistics
What the transformationalists seek, is a description of the highest
.possible generality

This leads us directly to the transformationalists’ notion of simplicity

which is defined within the theory itself, as a measure of the degree of
.linguistically significant generalization” achieved by a grammar
 On the purpose of linguistics
:In sum

Problem of non-uniqueness in linguistics description is the direct result

of the fact that “ choice of grammar for a particular language will
.always be much underdetermined by the data drawn from L alone
 On the purpose of linguistics
Justification of a particular grammar of L is only possible if we have at
.our disposal an explanatory theory of language

This entails both an explicit characterization of the form of (possible)

grammars and the development of an evaluation (or simplicity)
.measure
 On the purpose of linguistics
The second main aspect of Chomskyan revolution can be characterized
briefly as:

Linguistics shall no longer be considered as a “classificatory” science

but an “explanatory” one in the sense that the linguist main task shall
not be to collect and classify utterances but rather to attempt to
formulate a universal theory of language.
 On the purpose of linguistics

The theory might be utilized to yield a unique, explicit and explanatory

theory of the structures if the system which underlies the linguistic

.behavior of the speaker of the any particular language

 On the data of linguistics
The data with which the structuralist linguists were concerned with was
”“speech-forms

This restriction, was imposed in the name of objectivity and in a more

or less reaction against the previously dominant meaning-oriented
approach to linguistic description and also against the principles and
.methods of introspective psychology in general
 On the data of linguistics
Beyond such methodological consideration, it seems that there are other
things that speakers know about their utterances that do not emerge
.as features of a corpus

Speakers of a language know whether an utterance is grammatical or

.not or is ambiguous or synonymous with other utterances
 On the data of linguistics
By including the introspective judgments of native speakers of into the
body of the data which must be explained by grammar (or theory) of
any language, we are imposing additional requirements on the
.grammar, which the theory must meet in order to be acceptable

This makes the theory testing more difficult and theory rejecting much
easier
 On the data of linguistics

In sum , the empirical data with which linguistics must be concerned

with will consist not only of speech-forms but will also include various

.judgments which native speakers can make about these forms