Nine types of transformations: Is linguistics finally becoming meaningful?

Abstract

Noam Chomsky has led the way for linguists in the development of models which are “elegant” in the scientific sense. Generative transformational grammar is simple, complete, internally consistent, and rule-governed. From its inception, it has had a syntactic bias, however, and Chomsky has retained this syntactic bias through Interpretive Semantics, Extended Standard Theory and into Government and Binding. However, some linguists have taken Chomsky's model in a different direction, developing a semantic bias instead, a bias which Zellig Harris and Noam Chomsky had never originally foreseen or intended. George Lakoff and others have extended the concept to deal with different parts of speech (e.g. “use” vs “with”). Charles Fillmore and others have applied it to converses (e.g. “buy” vs “sell”). The generative semantists have argued that verbs like “kill” can be lexically decomposed into “cause,” “become” and “dead,” and this lexical decomposition is transformational in nature. More recently, the model of componential analysis in particlar and network models in general have extended this lexical decomposition process into all semantic areas, and again the concept of the grammatical transformation has proven very valuable.