Transformational Grammar - Formal Definition

Formal Definition

Chomsky's advisor, Zellig Harris, took transformations to be relations between sentences such as "I finally met this talkshow host you always detested" and simpler (kernel) sentences "I finally met this talkshow host" and "You always detested this talkshow host". Chomsky developed a formal theory of grammar where transformations manipulated not just the surface strings, but the parse tree associated to them, making transformational grammar a system of tree automata. This definition proved adequate for subsequent versions including the `extended', `revised extended', and `Government-Binding' (GB) versions of generative grammar, but may no longer be sufficient for the current minimalist grammar in that merge may require a formal definition that goes beyond the tree manipulation characteristic of Move α.

Read more about this topic:  Transformational Grammar

Famous quotes containing the words formal and/or definition:

    True variety is in that plenitude of real and unexpected elements, in the branch charged with blue flowers thrusting itself, against all expectations, from the springtime hedge which seems already too full, while the purely formal imitation of variety ... is but void and uniformity, that is, that which is most opposed to variety....
    Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.
    Walter Pater (1839–1894)