• Transformational grammar

“Transformational Generative grammar is primarily an outgrowth of taxonomic linguistics and secondarily a return to some of the main tenets of traditional grammar”⁵. The body of work of transformational grammar⁶ owes its inspiration to the insights of Noam Chomsky in the mid-50s as his approach became one of the most influential syntactic theories of the XX^th century. Although by no means all practising linguists adhere to its principles, none can ignore them and the mainstream of linguistics since 1957, the year when Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures appeared, has been dominated by Noam Chomsky.

According to N. Chomsky, the aim of grammar is not connected with the procedure of discovering speech regularities, but it boils down to modeling native speakers’ activities. Noam Chomsky looked upon grammar as a mechanism responsible for generating sentences [Алпатов 1999: 310-311]. That’s why Chomsky’s grammar is not only transformational but also generative. Moreover, unlike traditional linguistics, the main claim of generative grammar is that speech generation starts at the level of abstract syntactic structures and goes down to the phonological level. On top of that, Noam Chomsky’s approach was revolutionary in ‘its commitment to a construction of an explanatory linguistic theory’⁷.

In brief, the tenets of transformational generative grammar may be summed up as follows:

1. Grammar should be descriptive, not prescriptive.

2. Grammars should characterize competence, not performance.

3. Grammars should be fully explicit.

4. Linguistic analysis should be maximally general.

5. The theory of grammar should make universal claims.

6. Grammars should be psychologically relevant [The Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 297-300].

In Syntactic Structures (1957) Chomsky proposed that grammar should be considered as an autonomous system, independent of semantic or phonological systems though of course bearing a relation to them. Furthermore, he proposed that syntax itself should consist of a number of distinct but related levels, each of which bears a particular part of the descriptive burden. The two most important are phrase-structure and transformational components.

The phrase-structure is an underlying structure, or deep structure. “…the post–lexical structures are called DEEP STRUCTURES”⁸. The phrase-structure includes a noun-phrase (NP) and a verb-phrase (VP). A noun-phrase normally contains at least one noun (the head of the phrase), possibly with other elements such as determiners and adjectives, or a relative clause or another modifier. A verb-phrase includes the complements of the verb as a direct object, indirect object, and even a sentence:

E.g. They [saw me]. She [gave the book to me]. You [said that you would arrive on time].

The transformation is a structural change. For example, the question Is Pat here? is derived by transformation from the declarative Pat is here. But to be a transformation the change should employ the same lexemes, no new lexemes can be introduced, cf.: Лес шумит → шум леса, but not => Лес производит шум⁹. Thus, transformations are “essentially rules for relating one syntactic structure to another” [The Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 100]. That means that a transformational rule is a rule that maps one syntactic-analysis tree into another. This is done with the help of adjoining, moving, deleting, or copying a constituent. The overall structure of the model as it applies to simple sentences is as follows:

Phrase-structure rules: “Underlying structure”/Deep structure



Transformations



Surface structure

Phrase-structure rules are general principles which determine what kinds of sentence structures are possible in a language.

Though transformational theory is quite complex it can be roughly described in two rules which in their turn account for the name of the whole approach. “The fundamental idea is that surface structures are formed through the interaction of at least two distinct types of rules: base rules, which generate abstract phrase structure representations; and transformational rules, which move elements and otherwise rearrange structures to give the surface structures”¹⁰. The overly rich, descriptive rule systems of the 50s and 60s have gradually been replaced by simpler, more constrained rule systems. On the whole, linguists were after general, universal principles which govern the form and functioning of these rules and the properties of their inputs and outputs.

Thus, transformation is a formal linguistic operation (a transformational rule) that shows a correspondence between two structures, e.g. active and passive voice sentences. According to N. Chomsky, “syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages”. He understood grammar as a device that puts pieces of sentences together according to precise rules. These rules make it possible to describe grammar systematically, as opposed to the more anecdotal approach of traditional grammars [The Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 297]. That’s why the main attention was paid to all kinds of transformations possible in the language. But the meaning was completely overlooked. Thus structural ambiguities were not covered by this kind of analysis (cf. I shot [an elephant] [in my pajamas] ÷ I shot [an elephant [in my pajamas] ]). Moreover, transformational analysis was mainly restricted to simple sentences.

Vehement criticism of Chomskyan linguistics comes from researchers who underline its highly abstract, in-depth character, dependence of grammaticality judgments on the linguistic experience of a native speaker, overall claims made about linguistic universals. Sometimes generative grammar analyses break down when applied to languages which have not previously been studied. Moreover, another common criticism of Chomskyan analysis of specific language is that they force all languages into an English-like mold, by which they mean the SVO (subject-verb-object) pattern. Transformational analysis was also criticized as it did not make distinctions between different interpretations of one and the same grammatical structure (in sentences like Flying planes can be dangerous / I shot an elephant in my pajamas). Similarly transformational analysis was not applicable to some linguistic structures, cf.: John gave a book to Mary → John gave Mary a book, but not John asked Mary a question or They transmitted enemy propaganda.

To sum up Chomsky’s contribution to linguistic theory, it should be noted that it was Noam Chomsky who put syntax at the centre of linguistics where formerly it had stood quietly at the back door. Secondly, grammar, by Chomsky, was seen “as a theory of a language, constrained and evaluated just as any other theory in the sciences” [Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 100]. Chomsky and his followers aimed at constructing a completely explicit formula that would generate the infinitude of the sentences of the language. The goal of Chomsky’s theory was “to describe language as a property of the human mind and to explain its source”¹¹. In other words, “a generative grammar is a formal system (of rules, later of principles and parameters) which makes explicit the finite mechanisms available to the brain to produce infinite sentences in ways that have empirical consequences and can be tested as in the natural sciences” [Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 100]. Thus “the generative grammarian is concerned with the construction of a viable theory of linguistic competence”¹². Thirdly, he was explicit pointing out that semantic intuitions should not play a role in linguistic description. An overall contribution made by N. Chomsky to language study was that his “Syntactic Structures” triggered an intense research program in linguistics and related sciences.

Chomsky's first crops of linguistics Ph.D.'s began to appear in the mid 1960's, and thereafter increasing numbers of American linguists were taught by linguists who had been taught by Chomsky himself. These students, and their students, tended to inherit the idea that little of substantial value had been said about language in the centuries immediately prior to Chomsky. In the late 1960's and early 1970's several developments altered this picture.

• Generative semantics (60-s – 70-s)

The primary issue about meaning at the time of L. Bloomfield and N. Chomsky was whether or not intuitions about meaning should play any role in determining grammatical (= syntactic, morphological, or phonological) analysis. The worry was that if they were allowed to play a role, they would contaminate the analyses. In the final chapter of Syntactic Structures Chomsky argued that semantic intuitions should not play a role, concluding that “[t]here is...little evidence that "intuition about meaning" is at all useful in the actual investigation of linguistic form”¹³. In the decades following, linguists found themselves unable to resist looking at meaning. The ability of one and the same sentence to express different content was illustrated by the famous examples like Visiting relatives can be annoying, Hunting tigers can be dangerous, or Flying planes can be dangerous. On the other hand, one and the same content may be expressed by different sentences: The builders are building the house and The house was being built by the workers or even The house which was being built by the... Thus, Chomsky’s followers began to understand that it was not structure but meaning that contributed to speech generation. A couple of developments in syntactic analysis made possible the main tenet of the school of thought called generative semantics: that the deep structure of a sentence constitutes a representation of its meaning. Following the work of linguists such as Charles Fillmore, Paul Postal, James McCawley, John R. Ross, and George and Robin Lakoff, deep structures took on some of the aspects of a semantic representation.

Thus, the notion of deep structure advanced by Noam Chomsky became the so-called apple of discord. The representatives of generative semantics, such as G. Lakoff and J. McCawley considered such a theoretical construct as a deep structure useless. The leading idea of generative semantics is that there is no principled distinction between syntactic processes and semantic processes. The notion of “deep structure” was vigorously opposed by generative semanticists. Instead they propounded the idea of the semantic level where all the information relevant for the syntactic structure of the sentence is accumulated. This level (called underlying or semantic structure) comprises the basic grammatical relations and selectional restrictions. The underlying structure is an abstract structure which represents all the semantic features, constituting the meaning of a sentence. It includes not only the semantic elements corresponding to the syntactic elements of a sentence, but also “abstract” higher verbs, which cannot be found in the corresponding syntactic structure. Thus, in the sentence John killed Bill the underlying structure can be represented with the help of a lexical paraphrase John caused Bill to become not alive, which explicitly shows the abstract higher verb to cause. The sentence Open the door! can be paraphrased into I order you to open the door where the sentence-type marker is represented by the verb to order.

Another idea put forward by generative semanticists (J. Katz, J. Fodor) is that the word is characterized by distinct semantic features like a phoneme does. These features are opposed to each other in the system of binary oppositions (e.g., animate/inanimate, human/non-human, etc.). This semantic network can be represented in the form of a tree diagram of semantic constituents. Moreover, J. Katz and J. Fodor introduce a system of projection rules which guide selection of meanings which words have in isolation (e.g., in The man hits the colorful ball the occurrence of hits blocks the reading of ball as a formal gathering for social dancing). Thus J. Katz and J. Fodor saw their goal as the reconstruction of “the speaker’s ability to interpret any of the infinitely many sentences of his language”¹⁴.

Hence, generative semantics claims that the derivation of the sentence is a direct transformational mapping from semantics to surface structure. How and where lexical items enter the derivation was a topic of controversy.

Chart 2. The correlation of semantic representation and surface structures within generative semantics.

SEMANTIC REPRESENTATTION

L EXICON ??????????

SURFACE STRUCTURE

To sum it up, deep structures were held to be semantic by nature. Thus, two levels were considered equal: the deep structure and semantic representation, as syntax was claimed to be sensitive to semantic and contextual factors. The hypotheses of generative semanticists were based on the following assumptions:

1. the purely syntactic level of “deep structure” cannot exist;

2. the initial representations of derivations (the process of the formation of new sentences) are logical representations which are identical from language to language;

3. all aspects of meaning are representable in phrase-marker form.

Generative semantics turned out both a method of grammatical description and a general methodological approach¹⁵. In a sense, it made the ideas and methods of transformational grammar logically complete. And from this point of view generative semantics cannot be regarded as a counterrevolution to transformational generative grammar. Generative semantics did not get the status of the dominating linguistic theory as it was ousted by pragmatically oriented speech-act theory and logical semantics, less strict linguistic theories focusing on human communication¹⁶. In the long run, generative semantics brought about the ideas of Cognitive Linguistics which is aimed at getting over the shortcomings and limitations of generative semantic theory¹⁷.

• Text linguistics

Early modern linguistics, with its emphasis on discovering and describing the minimal units of each of the linguistic levels of sound, form, syntax, and semantics, made no provision for the study of long stretches of text as such; traditional grammatical analysis is context-free and thus stops at sentence length. But linguists could not help noticing that “language does not occur in stray words or sentences but in connected discourse”¹⁸. “Text linguistics is a very general label for that many faceted movement which professedly deals with text theory and discourse analysis. Its supporters claim that sentence grammars are incapable of describing all the relevant aspects and mechanisms of language. Many of them (Teun van Dijk, Janoš Petöfi, Hans Reiser) prefer special text grammars to grammars that merely add textual components to treatments of the sentence”¹⁹. “Thus genuine research into text linguistics starts where sentence grammar fails to provide adequate explanations for linguistic phenomena”²⁰.

Early large-scale enquiries into text organization remained essentially descriptive and structurally based (Pike 1967, Koch 1971, Harweg 1976). Text was defined as a unit “of whatever length, that does form a unified whole”²¹, and the research was oriented towards discovering and classifying types of text structure; these were assumed to be something given. The descriptive method, however, tends to break down because the language is too complex with too many and diverse constituents. Thus, a new outlook on text encouraged the upsurge in text linguistics in the 70-s and facilitated the development of the so-called procedural approach. By a procedural approach linguists mean an approach in which “all the levels of language are to be described in terms of their utilization” (de Beaugrande, Dressler). Within this approach diverse problems were brought to the fore:

• feature of “mentioned” versus “non-mentioned” (Isenberg, de Beaugrande);

• treating text as a single sentence (de Beaugrande, Dressler);

• attempting to construct a grammar and lexicon of a concrete text (Hannes Rieser, Peter Hartmann, Janos Petöfi, Teun van Dijk);

• defining text categories (I. Galperin).

In brief, S.J. Schmidt summed up the achievements of this approach - divergent as the different standpoints might be – as communication-oriented for they aimed “to construct theories which allow the linguist to describe and explain, within the framework of a homogenous theory, the internal structure of sentences and texts as well as the conditions and rules underlying successful communication”²².

Thus text was defined in terms of communication, as a communicative occurrence which meets seven standards of textuality, namely cohesion (structural unity) and coherence (meaningful unity), intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality. These seven standards function as the constitutive principles which define and create communication. There are three more, regulative principles, which control textual communication: of efficiency (minimum effort), effectiveness (creating favourable conditions for attaining the result), and appropriateness (determines the correlation between the current situation and the standards of textuality) [The Linguistics Encyclopedia 1995: 469-471].

Nowadays text linguistics is represented by text analysis, on the one hand, and discourse analysis, on the other. Though some linguists use these terms interchangeably, others draw a clear line of distinction between them. The term text is usually reserved to refer to any record of a communicative event involving oral language (e.g., a shopping transaction, a casual conversation, a sermon) or written language (e.g., a poem, a poster, a novel). The term discourse usually refers to the interpretation of the communicative event in context. Thus there is a certain shift from the formal structural semantic plane of studies within text linguistics to the sign-informational aspect covered by discourse analysis.

Defining the term discourse linguists emphasize different features of this many-faceted phenomenon. Within the wider approach discourse is understood as ‘language use’ or ‘language-in-use’²³. But there are also definitions which are more specific. Thus David Crystal defines discourse as a “continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such as a sermon, argument, joke or narrative”²⁴. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics gives a similar definition: discourse is “any coherent succession of sentences, spoken or (in most usage) written” [Matthews 1997: 100]. Although early linguistic approaches judged the unit of discourse to be larger than the sentence, nowadays phenomena of interest can range from silence, to a single utterance (such as ok), to a novel, a set of newspaper articles or a conversation. ”The major assertions made from all these approaches to the definition of discourse are that (1) discourse is defined in terms of meaning and (2) discourse brings together language, the individual producing the language, and the context within which the language is used²⁵.

It is obvious that context is an important concept in discourse analysis. Context refers to the situation giving rise to the discourse, and within which the discourse is embedded. There are two different types of context. The first of these is the linguistic context – the language that surrounds or accompanies the piece of discourse under analysis. The second is non-linguistic or experiential context within which the discourse takes place. It includes the type of communicative event (e.g., a joke, a story, a lecture, etc.); the topic; the purpose of the event; the setting; the participants and the relationships between them; and the background knowledge underlying the communicative event²⁶. In this light discourse “refers to the set of norms, preferences, and expectations relating language to context, which language users draw on and modify in producing and making sense out of language in context”²⁷.

Discourse analysis also includes a distinct area of studies which is aimed at revealing peculiarities of conversational interaction. This research area lies within the scope of conversational analysis. Questions that conversation analysis has investigated include:

• How do topics get nominated, accepted, maintained and changed?

• How is speaker selection and change organized?

• How are conversational ambiguities resolved?

• How are non-verbal and verbal aspects of conversation organized and integrated?

• What role does intonation play in conversation management?

• What recurring functional patterns are there in conversation, and how are these organized?

• How is socially sanctioned behavior (politeness versus rudeness, directness versus indirectness) mediated through²⁸.

Discourse analysis was first employed in 1952 by Zellig Harris as the name for ‘a method for the analysis of connected speech (or writing)’, i.e., ‘for continuing descriptive linguistics beyond the limits of a single sentence at a time’, and for ‘correlating culture and language’. Hence discourse analysis, on the one hand, is a subfield of linguistics, and on the other hand, it goes beyond linguistics as discourse analysts research various aspects of language not as an end in itself, but as a means to explore ways in which language forms are shaped by and shape the contexts of their use. It is not surprising that to reach this goal discourse analysis draws upon not only linguistics, but also anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences concerned with human communication. Thus approaches that are commonly covered by the term 'discourse studies' (or have overlapping concerns) include critical discourse analysis, critical linguistics, text linguistics, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, discursive psychology, stylistics, genre studies, mediated discourse analysis, discourse theory, sociolinguistics, rhetorical analysis, argumentation theory, polyphony theory. Key theorists are Mikhail Bakhtin, Teun van Dijk, Norman Fairclough, Michael Halliday, Ron Scollon, Michael Stubbs, Ruth Wodak.