Transformations and Categories in Syntax

Abstract

Many linguists are interested in the question, What is the relation between the grammatical form and the logical form of natural language sentences? Let us suppose that the grammatical form of sentences is given by a transformational grammar G, which generates each sentence with an associated structural description, consisting of the sequence of constituent structure trees in a transformational derivation of that sentence. The set of all such pairs of sentences and their structural descriptions can be thought of as the set of grammatical forms. Let us also suppose that the logical form of sentences is represented in an appropriate logic, or disambiguated interpreted language L, and think of the set of well-formed formulas of L as the set of logical forms. Suppose finally that we have a ‘translation’ mapping Ф from the set of grammatical forms to the set of logical forms. Then our question is, What are the properties of Ф? The basic issue that has divided transformational grammarians for nearly ten years is whether Ф is trivial. Linguists of the Generative Semantics school have held that it is, and those of the Interpretive Semantics school have held that it is not. Ф can be thought of as a system of rules of semantic interpretation.1