Transformational Generative Grammar-03 Year Students of Bhiksu University, Anuradhapura

1.  Transformational Grammar/Transformational-Generative Grammar.

2.  A sentence can be written in many ways. It can be written as a statement, question or in negative form.

3.  You can generate many sentences from one single sentence as discussed below.

4.  Introduced by Noam Chomsky

·        Tenses

·        Questions

·        Person

·         First Person/Second Person/Third Person

·        I go. /He goes.

·        Singular/Plural

·        We play.

·        He plays.

Present	Past	Future
He writes a letter.	He wrote a letter.	He will write a letter.
Does he write a letter?
He does not write a letter.
Doesn’t he write a letter?

Simple Present: He comes.

Present Continuous: He is coming.

Present Perfect: He has come.

Present Perfect Continuous: He has been coming.

Active Voice	Passive Voice
He writes a letter.	A letter is written by him.
He wrote a letter-.	A letter was written by him.

Mala prepare dinner (Deep Structure)

----------------------------- (Surface Structure)

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Transformational grammar relates the active sentence “John read the book” with its corresponding passive, “The book was read by John.” The statement “George saw Mary” is related to the corresponding questions, “Whom [or who] did George see?” and “Who saw Mary?” Although sets such as these active and passive sentences appear to be very different on the surface (i.e., in such things as word order), a transformational grammar tries to show that in the “underlying structure” (i.e., in their deeper relations to one another), the sentences are very similar. Transformational grammar assigns a “deep structure” and a “surface structure” to show the relationship of such sentences. Thus, “I know a man who flies planes” can be considered the surface form of a deep structure approximately like “I know a man. The man flies airplanes.” The notion of deep structure can be especially helpful in explaining ambiguous utterances; e.g., “Flying airplanes can be dangerous” may have a deep structure, or meaning, like “Airplanes can be dangerous when they fly” or “To fly air planes can be dangerous.”

The most widely discussed theory of transformational grammar was proposed by U.S. linguist Noam Chomsky in 1957.