An Introductory Transformational Grammar

An Introductory Transformational Grammar

1. Traditional grammar

   • Until the sixteenth century, Latin grammar was the primary language studied in english schools.
     • By the sixteenth century, English was relying exclusively on word order to indicate these relationship. A change in word order produces a change in meaning.
       • In that order, English word order was largely ignored.
         • In the Renaissance, Latin was replaced as the language of scholarship by English.
           • With Descriptive English Grammar some researchers followed latin rules to make parts of the english speech such as person, number, gender, mood, tense, etc. Therefore, sentences were classified as simple, compound, complex, or compound-complex and clauses were classified as independent, noun, adjective, adverb, ect.

2. Structural Grammar

   • During the twentieth century a new approach to the study of language evolved structural linguistics. Those new researchers felt that it was necessary to study the structure of the language objectively as possible without reference to any other language.
     • They attempted to analyze other grammatical elements in terms of structure rather than meaning.
       • The structuralists based their conclusions upon analyses of sentences that they had collected from native speakers fo english.
         • One of the most remarkable structuralists was Charles C. Fries who made a book called American English Grammar in 1940.

3. Transformational Grammar

   • Transformational grammar appear in 1957 with the publication of Noam Chomsky´s Syntactic Structutures.
     • The transformational grammarian in not content with describing what he finds in a corpus of senteces collected from native speakers. He feels that his grammar should enable one to produce all sentences of language.
       • The transformational grammar agrees that various social groups or in some contexts the native speakers can use wrong words out of order or make false starts to change their constructions in midcourse.
         • The transformational grammar are interested in the speaker´s competence or knowledge of the language, rather than in his performance or actual use of it.