Evolution of Transformational Grammar

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the evolution of transformational grammar. It was developed in the mid-1950s by Noam Chomsky. Over the next two decades it became the dominant paradigm in syntactic theory and description and its descendant, government binding theory, is still one of the most influential current theories. Transformational grammar forms a wide-ranging theory, whose central tenets are the use of hypothetico-deductive methodology to construct formal models of certain aspects of human linguistic capabilities. Such models are called “grammars” in the theory and are taken to be an encoding, in some form, of the native speaker's linguistic knowledge. Structural linguistics is expected to transcend the limits of the sentence and offer a method of approaching discourse level structures. For Chomsky, on the other hand, transformations formed part of a program directed at characterizing the nature and properties of the human language faculty. Chomsky's analysis thus depends upon an abstract structure in which the affixes of the auxiliary system do not appear in their “surface” order.