Generative Semiotic

THE BASIS OF TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR

GRAMMAR: SYNTACTIC VIEW

Transformational grammar grew out of a linguist’s concern with what he called “deep” structure.

The structuralists’ major contribution to sentence-level analysis was  a cutting  and labeling  procedure called immediate constituent analysis.

Chomsky’s transformational-generative theory has come to be known simply as transformational grammar.

A transformational grammar has three major kinds of rules: syntactic rules, which specify the deep structure and then transform it into a surface structure; semantic rules, which provide an interpretation for the sentence; and phonological rules, which specify information necessary in pronouncing the sentence.

Syntactic rules: Deal primarily with word order, agreement, and word inflection.

The model of syntactic component of grammar; is a model which will produce strings of words very much like English sentences.  It has two major parts: 1) a set of phrase structure rules, plus lexicon; and 2) a set of transformational rules. The phrase structure rules and lexicon provide the deep structure. The transformational rules produce surface structure, a string ready to be pronounced or written as an actual sentence.

Ex.- a + student + paint + PAST + the + picture

THE SYNTICATIC COMPONENT OF A TRASNFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR

PHRASE STRUCTURE RULES AND LEXICON

1) Divide the sentence. Ex.- The astronaut can walk.       The astronaut | can walk.

2) Make a diagram of the constituent parts.

 

3) Represent abstractly as follows:

Phrase structure rules build up sentences by specifying the basic parts in increasingly great detail.

Lexicon is something like a dictionary.

 

TRANSFORMATIONS AND THE STRUCTURES OF THE AUXILIARY

The transformationalists’ contribution: generalizations about the basic structure of the English auxiliary.

1. The first auxiliary word is always in the present or the past tense form.

2. If a form of HAVE occurs in the auxiliary, the next word will be in the present participle form.

3. If a form of BE occurs in the auxiliary, the next word will be in the present participle form.

4. The order of the auxiliary words is invariable: the modal comes first, then the HAVE auxiliary, and last the BE auxiliary.

CURRENT TRENDS IN TRASNFORMATIONAL THEORY

TRANSFORMATIONAL SEMANTICS

KATZ AND FODOR’S SEMANTICS

In 1963, the trasnformationalists Jorrold J. Katz and Jerry Fodor constructed a semantic theory to explain how a speaker of any language assigns semantic interpretation to sentences

According to Katz and Fodor, the semantic component of a grammar would include a dictionary with entries like the following:

(Semantic markers): they indicate broad classes of semantic information.

[Distinguishers]: they convey quite specific information about the word in the entry.

FILLMORE’S CASE GRAMMAR

In 1966 and 1967, Charles Fillmore proposed that “the grammatical notion of case deserves a place in the base component of every language.”

To Fillmore, case means underlying semantic relationship between a nominal and its verbal, or predicator, which may be a verb, adjective or noun.

CASES:

Agent (A): The case of the animate instigator of the action or state identified by the predicator.

Experiencer (E): The case of the animate being affected by the action or stated identified by the predicator.

Intrument (I): The case of the inanimate force, object, or cause involved in the action or state identified by the predicator.

.Object (O): The case limited essentially to things which are contained, which move or undergo change identified by the predicator.

Source (So):  he case of the origin or starting point of the action or state identified by the predicator.

Goal (G): The case of the end point of objective of the action or state identified by the predicator.

Location (L): The case of the spatial orientation of the action or state identified by the predicator.

Time (T): The case that specifies the time of the action or state identified by the predicator.

GENERATIVE SEMANTICS

James D. McCawley concluded that Chomsky’s deep syntactic level was an artificial level between the semantic deep structure and the surface structure. McCawley proposed instead that a single set of transformations connects a semantic representation of a sentence with its surface structures.

McCawley and the neo-transformationalists hold that the generative power of the language resides in its semantic system. This theory is called generative semantics.