LINGUISTICS ASSIGNMENT

In Linguistics, a transformational grammar is a a generative grammar, predominantly of a natural language. It is a theory of grammar that accounts for the constructions of a language by linguistic transformations and phrase structures and it has been developed on the basis of the ‘phrase structure grammars’ of Noam Chomsky.

Beginning in 1957, Chomsky came up with two significant ideas- the concept of competence and performance and the Generative Transformational Grammar.

In words of Chomsky, “a generative grammar models only the knowledge that underlies the human ability to speak and understand.” It tries to explain language creativity i.e how human beings are able to utter and perceive the sentences never heard before by them. He argued that this creativity is possible by the generative nature of the transformational grammar.

In the year 1957,Chomsky came up with the idea (Syntactic Structures),that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation-a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure signified the core semantic relations of a sentence, and was mapped on to the surface structure (which followed the phonological form of the sentence very closely) via transformations. He argued that there were considerable similarities between languages' deep structures, and these structures would represent properties that were common to all languages and were draped in their surface structures.

Upon consideration of the two sentences- 'Rahul wrote a book on German' and 'A book on German was written by Rahul', Chomsky argued that the transformational grammar provides a characterization of this common form and how it is manipulated to produce actual sentences.

This transformational grammar formed basis for many subsequent theories of human grammatical knowledge. Though current theories differ significantly from the original, the notion of a transformation remains a central element in most models.

The ‘Basic Linguistic Theory’ was propounded by R. Dixon. The theory refers to the theoretical framework that is most widely employed in language description, particularly grammatical descriptions of entire languages. This framework is not very often recognized. This cumulative

framework has slowly developed over the past century as linguists have learned how to describe languages better. The theory is grounded in traditional grammar and is viewed as having evolved out of traditional grammar. It has also been heavily influenced by pre-generative structuralist traditions, especially in emphasizing the need to describe each language in its own terms, rather than imposing on individual languages concepts whose primary motivation comes from other languages, in contrast to traditional grammar and many recent theoretical frameworks.

Basic linguistic theory is different from many other theoretical frameworks in the sense that it is not a formal theory i.e. many grammatical phenomenon can be characterized by sufficient precision in English, without the use of formalism. It is the traditional grammar modified in various ways by other theoretical traditions over the years, particularly by Role and Reference, Grammar, Functional Grammar and Construction Grammar.