{"id":9308,"date":"2019-05-22T16:17:21","date_gmt":"2019-05-22T16:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/transformational_grammar_approach\/"},"modified":"2019-05-22T16:17:21","modified_gmt":"2019-05-22T16:17:21","slug":"transformational_grammar_approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/transformational_grammar_approach\/","title":{"rendered":"Transformational grammar approach"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A linguistic theory developed by Noam Chomsky in opposition to a behaviorist account of language based on the work of his teacher Zellig Harris (1909-1992), and initially formulated in his book <span class=\"\" style=\"font-style: italic;\">Syntactic structures<\/span> (1957). &nbsp;In essence, it provides a methodology for describing the relationships between sentences expressing similar concepts to underlying &#8216;deep structures&#8217; by means of various transformational rules and phrase structures. &nbsp;Central to Chomsky&#8217;s theory is that humans are innately predisposed to language abilities, and that such transformational rules are linguistic universals. &nbsp;The conductor, Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), tried in 1976 to use the theory in arguing for the existence of musical universals in his book &nbsp;The unanswered question based on the Norton Lectures (1973) he gave at Harvard University. While generative grammar defines rules that can generate the infinite number of well-formed grammatical sentences possible in a language based on a rationalist standpoint, transformational grammar attempts to identify the transformations governing relations between parts of a sentence, based on the assumption that a fundamental structure underneath such grammatical features as word order. &nbsp;Together, transformational and generative grammar provided an enormous impetus for the establishment of present-day approaches to linguistics. &nbsp;While Chomsky and followers have abandoned much of the original content of transformational grammar, it continues to be fruitfully applied in syntactic analysis and in the study of children&#8217;s language development. &nbsp;Currently, the Chomskyan approach to linguistics is best labeled transformational-generative grammar (TGG). &nbsp;There are a number of rules associated with TGG. &nbsp;Perhaps the simplest is the head initial\/final rule. &nbsp;In head initial, the head occurs before its argument as in, for example<\/p>\n<p>Saw a dog (verse phrase), completion of an essay (noun phrase), and on the table (prepositional phrase). With the head occurring after its argument, examples of head final are<\/p>\n<p>bravely done (verb phrase) and the big black dog (noun phrase). While there are exceptions, most languages incorporate only one of these structures. &nbsp;For example, Japanese is a head final language, while English is a head initial language, and on the whole somewhat more languages are head final.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>See <a href=\"competence_-linguistics-\">Competence (linguistics)<\/a>, Cognitive-functionalist approach, Deep and surface structure, <a href=\"generative_grammar_approach\">Generative grammar approach<\/a>, <a href=\"linguistics\">Linguistics<\/a>, <a href=\"syntax\">Syntax<\/a>, <a href=\"systemic_functional_linguistics\">Systemic functional linguistics<\/a><\/p>\n<p><\/body><\/html><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A linguistic theory developed by Noam Chomsky in opposition to a behaviorist account of language based on the work of his teacher Zellig Harris (1909-1992), and initially formulated in his book Syntactic structures (1957). &nbsp;In essence, it provides a methodology for describing the relationships between sentences expressing similar concepts to underlying &#8216;deep structures&#8217; by means &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/transformational_grammar_approach\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Transformational grammar approach&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-9308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-glossary","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fas\/psych\/glossary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}