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ENGLISH TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR. by Roderick A and Peter S Rosenbaum. Jacobs
When we speak of studying transformational grammar, we refer to a framework within which a number of questions about human intellectual capacity, questions concerning the knowledge involved in "speaking" a language, have been answered and currently are being answered. This framework is a set of principles, called linguistic universals, which allow us to describe what we, as native speakers of English, know about our language intuitively. Without such guiding principles, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain a correct description of English.
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First published January 1, 1968
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November 18, 2010
If I had written this book I probably would have put the epilogue as an introduction. It is only 25 pages, but it explains the point of the book and, to be honest, it just seems to make sense to me that explaining the point of a book should be done right at the start rather than right at the end.
I’m going to assume no knowledge at all and so use this review to try to explain this book to the absolute novice.
How do we know that a sentence like this - *I believe that myself is honest – is not a grammatical sentence? I don’t mean, are you able to put into words (perhaps words that use grammatical metalanguage like ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’ or ‘pronouns’) WHY that sentence is not grammatical. I mean, more generally, where does the gut feeling come from when we hear a sentence like that makes us just know it isn’t grammatical?
The English language consists of potentially an infinite number of well-formed sentences. Now, if that is true it just isn’t possible for us to have seen all of these well-formed sentences before. In fact, most sentences we come across will be completely new to us. Try this – take any sentence from any review on Good Reads and put it into Google. You are almost assured to find that Google brings you back to the review you got the sentence from. In fact, this was how an ex-member was caught plagiarising reviews, but that is another story. Think about what that means for a second. You can take virtually any sentence from any review and that sentence is likely to only occur once on the entire Internet – and that is true no matter which sentence you pick. That means that almost every sentence you read here is different from any other sentence you have ever read. That fact alone is enough to make my head spin.
This brings us to Noam Chomsky. This book was edited by Chomsky before it was published. The idea of the book is to introduce readers to ‘transformation grammar’. This is based on a number of ideas from Chomsky’s work on language. I guess the main one is that we humans have an innate ability to put sentences together and that studying how language works teaches us something important about human psychology. The next is that, in a sense, the rules that govern how sentences work ought to be pretty simple and general. Let’s start with a metaphor. Humans start out as a single cell. Then that cell splits into two identical cells, and so on and on. Then, all of a sudden, the cells start ‘differentiating’ into brain cells and arms cells and liver cells. And these all end up in the right spots. We don’t really know very much about how this process works yet, but we do know it can’t be all that difficult. It may be still something beyond out technology to describe or replicate, but the fact that most humans (and other animals) come out pretty well ordered (hardly anyone has toenails growing out of their noses, for instance) means that the rules that govern this process must be fairly simple.
Grammar is a bit the same. If we can understand the meaning of an infinite number of sentences we have never seen before then the rules we have in our heads for decoding sentences must be pretty powerful. Transformational grammar is a way to try to understand what those rules are. So, if we can say that a sentence like, *I believe that myself is honest, isn’t a proper English sentence, how are we able to say that we know that?
This book tries to generate rules that will make a consistent grammar of English. Let me explain that. Chomsky says that there is the meaning of a sentence and then there is what we write or say. The meaning is related to what he calls the ‘deep structure’ and what we say he calls the ‘surface structure’. Sometimes sentences can use different words in different orders, but mean the same thing. Transformational grammar tries to see how we move from the deep structure of our language – what we mean – to the various surface structures – what we say or write. For example, these three surface structures mean pretty much the same things – Eric has a dictionary, the dictionary which Eric has and Eric’s dictionary. The first sentence is approximately what might be called the deep structure and the other sentences have had transformations enacted on them to move them from that deep structure to various surface structures. The point of grammar, then, in this account, is to show what rules exist to construct the types of sentences we see about us. What rules are there to account for these transformations from deep structure to surface structures.
The unit of meaning is the sentence. And the most basic unit of the sentence seems to be the noun phrase. Although, really, the authors made a pretty convincing argument that every noun phrase could best be characterised as a prepositional phrase on the deepest structural levels – and that adjectives should really be considered verbals without actual verbs… I know that I’ve probably lost half of you, but we are coming back to Standard English right now.
The point of this grammar isn’t really to label things are nouns and verbs, but to see what particular features of language generally do. Older grammars mostly start by naming features. Transformational grammar is trying to do something completely different. It wants to build a grammar from scratch that explains how English works – that is, are there common rules and ‘transformations’ that can be applied that help describe and explain why certain patterns appear in English? And can we use these to build up a series of rules that explain why certain sentences are grammatical and others are not?
The first of the rules discussed in this book is the passive transformation. Daisy puzzled Winterbourne can become Winterbourne was puzzled by Daisy. But what is interesting here is that you can use this transformation to make two nearly identical sentences, but the difference between the two sentences shows you what a noun phrase is. A noun phrase, in this instance, is what gets shifted to the front or to the back of the sentence when it goes through a passive transformation. So that The fact that Hannibal intended to avenge the Carthaginian defeat in the First Punic War dismayed Cato has two noun phrases which can be identified by changing this sentence to passive voice and seeing what moves around the verb – Cato was dismayed by the fact that Hannibal etc. That also means that the long start to this sentence “The fact that Hannibal intended to avenge the Carthaginian defeat in the First Punic War” is a single noun phrase.
The rest of the book is about identifying other such transformations that help to explain features of English grammar.
I learnt many interesting things from reading this book – but I do wonder if this is the most productive way of teaching grammar. One problem I have with this method is that it stops at the sentence level and ignores what I would call ‘context’. Take this sentence for example: "His identity and what he would testify to had been discovered by the government through the use of techniques that would not otherwise be permissible." This is a sentence taken from a news article today about the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be brought to trail and his being acquitted of all but one of the 280 charges brought against him. Parse that sentence anyway you like I would be surprised if you would ever find out that what is really meant by ‘the use of techniques that would not otherwise be permissible’ really means ‘by torturing him’. If grammar is about finding meaning from sentences, then this ‘meaning finding’ - that is , that ‘not otherwise permissible techniques’ means ‘torture’ is also important – and needs to come from a textual level analysis and a deconstruction of the context of the piece – not just an analysis of the syntax of sentences.
All the same, this was an interesting read.
I’m going to assume no knowledge at all and so use this review to try to explain this book to the absolute novice.
How do we know that a sentence like this - *I believe that myself is honest – is not a grammatical sentence? I don’t mean, are you able to put into words (perhaps words that use grammatical metalanguage like ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’ or ‘pronouns’) WHY that sentence is not grammatical. I mean, more generally, where does the gut feeling come from when we hear a sentence like that makes us just know it isn’t grammatical?
The English language consists of potentially an infinite number of well-formed sentences. Now, if that is true it just isn’t possible for us to have seen all of these well-formed sentences before. In fact, most sentences we come across will be completely new to us. Try this – take any sentence from any review on Good Reads and put it into Google. You are almost assured to find that Google brings you back to the review you got the sentence from. In fact, this was how an ex-member was caught plagiarising reviews, but that is another story. Think about what that means for a second. You can take virtually any sentence from any review and that sentence is likely to only occur once on the entire Internet – and that is true no matter which sentence you pick. That means that almost every sentence you read here is different from any other sentence you have ever read. That fact alone is enough to make my head spin.
This brings us to Noam Chomsky. This book was edited by Chomsky before it was published. The idea of the book is to introduce readers to ‘transformation grammar’. This is based on a number of ideas from Chomsky’s work on language. I guess the main one is that we humans have an innate ability to put sentences together and that studying how language works teaches us something important about human psychology. The next is that, in a sense, the rules that govern how sentences work ought to be pretty simple and general. Let’s start with a metaphor. Humans start out as a single cell. Then that cell splits into two identical cells, and so on and on. Then, all of a sudden, the cells start ‘differentiating’ into brain cells and arms cells and liver cells. And these all end up in the right spots. We don’t really know very much about how this process works yet, but we do know it can’t be all that difficult. It may be still something beyond out technology to describe or replicate, but the fact that most humans (and other animals) come out pretty well ordered (hardly anyone has toenails growing out of their noses, for instance) means that the rules that govern this process must be fairly simple.
Grammar is a bit the same. If we can understand the meaning of an infinite number of sentences we have never seen before then the rules we have in our heads for decoding sentences must be pretty powerful. Transformational grammar is a way to try to understand what those rules are. So, if we can say that a sentence like, *I believe that myself is honest, isn’t a proper English sentence, how are we able to say that we know that?
This book tries to generate rules that will make a consistent grammar of English. Let me explain that. Chomsky says that there is the meaning of a sentence and then there is what we write or say. The meaning is related to what he calls the ‘deep structure’ and what we say he calls the ‘surface structure’. Sometimes sentences can use different words in different orders, but mean the same thing. Transformational grammar tries to see how we move from the deep structure of our language – what we mean – to the various surface structures – what we say or write. For example, these three surface structures mean pretty much the same things – Eric has a dictionary, the dictionary which Eric has and Eric’s dictionary. The first sentence is approximately what might be called the deep structure and the other sentences have had transformations enacted on them to move them from that deep structure to various surface structures. The point of grammar, then, in this account, is to show what rules exist to construct the types of sentences we see about us. What rules are there to account for these transformations from deep structure to surface structures.
The unit of meaning is the sentence. And the most basic unit of the sentence seems to be the noun phrase. Although, really, the authors made a pretty convincing argument that every noun phrase could best be characterised as a prepositional phrase on the deepest structural levels – and that adjectives should really be considered verbals without actual verbs… I know that I’ve probably lost half of you, but we are coming back to Standard English right now.
The point of this grammar isn’t really to label things are nouns and verbs, but to see what particular features of language generally do. Older grammars mostly start by naming features. Transformational grammar is trying to do something completely different. It wants to build a grammar from scratch that explains how English works – that is, are there common rules and ‘transformations’ that can be applied that help describe and explain why certain patterns appear in English? And can we use these to build up a series of rules that explain why certain sentences are grammatical and others are not?
The first of the rules discussed in this book is the passive transformation. Daisy puzzled Winterbourne can become Winterbourne was puzzled by Daisy. But what is interesting here is that you can use this transformation to make two nearly identical sentences, but the difference between the two sentences shows you what a noun phrase is. A noun phrase, in this instance, is what gets shifted to the front or to the back of the sentence when it goes through a passive transformation. So that The fact that Hannibal intended to avenge the Carthaginian defeat in the First Punic War dismayed Cato has two noun phrases which can be identified by changing this sentence to passive voice and seeing what moves around the verb – Cato was dismayed by the fact that Hannibal etc. That also means that the long start to this sentence “The fact that Hannibal intended to avenge the Carthaginian defeat in the First Punic War” is a single noun phrase.
The rest of the book is about identifying other such transformations that help to explain features of English grammar.
I learnt many interesting things from reading this book – but I do wonder if this is the most productive way of teaching grammar. One problem I have with this method is that it stops at the sentence level and ignores what I would call ‘context’. Take this sentence for example: "His identity and what he would testify to had been discovered by the government through the use of techniques that would not otherwise be permissible." This is a sentence taken from a news article today about the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be brought to trail and his being acquitted of all but one of the 280 charges brought against him. Parse that sentence anyway you like I would be surprised if you would ever find out that what is really meant by ‘the use of techniques that would not otherwise be permissible’ really means ‘by torturing him’. If grammar is about finding meaning from sentences, then this ‘meaning finding’ - that is , that ‘not otherwise permissible techniques’ means ‘torture’ is also important – and needs to come from a textual level analysis and a deconstruction of the context of the piece – not just an analysis of the syntax of sentences.
All the same, this was an interesting read.
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