Transformational Grammar

Abstract

Abstract From the classical models (Chomsky 1957, 1965) through Government-Binding (GB) theory (Chomsky 1981, 1986) and the more recent Minimalist program (Chomsky 1995), (Generative- )Transformational Grammar (TG) has concerned itself primarily with an understanding of constituent structure and the implications of constituent structure for grammatical phenomena, including case marking, agreement, and other phenomena in which grammatical relations such as subject and object are implicated. The main idea is that representations of sentence structure primarily show the syntactic categories of elements (i.e. noun, verb, adjective, noun phrase, verb phrase, etc.), relations of constituency and containment (i.e. in what way elements, including words and phrases, are contained within larger phrases), and the linear order of constituents. Unlike in Relational Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar, and most other theories, both syntactic functions and semantic roles can and often do have a defining configurational instantiation. Unlike in other theories in which constituent structure plays a central role, such as Head-Driven Phrase-Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994), mismatches between linear order and grammatical relation and/or grammatical-relation sharing, splitting, or ambiguity can be attributed, at least in part, to transformations, that is movements of constituents within structures. Having been the most widely used theory of syntax for some time, it has been employed in analyses of countless phenomena in many languages and consequently has remained in considerable flux. Thus any detailed characterization of the theory” s approach to grammatical relations is necessarily era- and movement-contingent to some extent.