Illustration of transformational grammar
transformational grammar
- Definition:
A linguistic theory developed by Noam Chomsky, first put forth in his book
Syntactic Structures (1957),
that provides a methodology for describing the relationships between sentences
expressing similar concepts to underlying "deep structures" by means of various
transformational rules. A central premise of Chomsky's work is that humans are
innately predisposed to language abilities, and that such transformational
processes are linguistic universals.
Bernstein (1976)
tries to argue for a similar existence of musical universals.
