Katz, Jerrold J. The Philosophy of Language.

Chapter 1: Transformational Generative

Grammar: The Linguistic Foundation, pp. 18 – 23. New York: Harper & Row. 1966

This chapter discusses about grammar where it is a set of rules operating upon a

certain data for certain purposes. Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics,

propounded the concept of transformational generative grammar where it provides a

description of the grammatical structure of each sentence. Jerrold Katz gave emphasis

on how generative grammar transforms one sentence into another by keeping the

meaning intact and specify the grammatical rules underlying the construction of sentence

through the methods of evaluation procedure.

According to Chomsky the syntactic description of sentences has two aspects, the

surface structure and deep structure. A theory of language should not confine only with

syntax; but also with meaning. It should deal both with syntax and semantic. In this

chapter, the deep structure is introduced to explain the fact of meaning or determines the

semantic interpretation. Deep structure is responsible for identifying what the sentence is

all about. It will help examine the sentence structure and the underlying meanings at a

deeper level.

The grammar should be so designed that by following its rules any of the possible

sentences of the language can be generated. Katz’s book explained clearly the concept

of generative grammar, thus this chapter is beneficial to the research topic since it focuses

mainly on how deep structure in generative grammar is applied in sentence construction.

Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Chapter I: The Organization of

Generative Grammar, pp. 15 – 18. Cambridge: The MIT Press. 1965

Noam Chomsky’s book concerns on the syntactic theory and the syntactic

component of generative grammar. The knowledge of a language involves the implicit

ability to understand indefinitely many sentences. Thus, Chomsky introduced three major

components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic

components. The three components have system of rules that regulates the flow of

grammar.

This chapter iterates on the organization of generative grammar and how it

generates indefinitely large number of structures. Chomsky explains the syntactic

component concerning formatives, their inherent properties, and their interrelations in a

given sentence. There are different and specific rules that each of the components hold,

rules that are useful in sentence construction since it is all about how a sentence must be

structured in order to construct syntactically and semantically correct sentences.

Chomsky explained the concept of generative grammar and extracting patterns on

the organization of generative grammar. This chapter gave a clear modification on the

rules of generative grammar on the different major components of grammar. The syntactic

component of a grammar must specify, for each sentence, a deep structure that

determines its semantic interpretation and a surface structure that determines its phonetic

interpretation. The syntactic component must generate deep and surface structures and

must interrelate to the sentence structure.

Touilaat, Bouchaib. Transformational Generative Grammar: Some Aspects of Movement

Transformation. 2015

The author discusses Chomsky’s generative grammar which was defined as a

system of rules that are applied successively in order to generate a deep structure of a

sentence, interpret it, transform it to a surface structure, and eventually interpret this

surface structure. Touilaat explained how the deep structure of a sentence undergone

stages in order the surface structure of a sentence to generate.

The author examined the relationship of deep structure to the surface structure

and discussed the different transformational rules of generative grammar.

Transformational rules have certain constraints which indicate either those rules are

appled or not. In order to generate the deep structure of a sentence, there are specific

phrase structure rules in the base of the syntactic component applies a system of

categorial rewriting rules that take the form of a sequential derivation.

This research paper stated that there are different arguments on the way the deep

structure of a sentence would look like. Thus, any sentence can have different deep

structures. The generated deep structure contains transformational marker by which the

transformational rules are applied. Deep structures have rules that are postulated to

analyze the sentence structure in constructing sentences. Thus, Touilaat’s research

paper can be used as a reference in this study.

Bierwisch, Manfred. Generative Grammar. International Encyclopedia of the Social &

Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015

Bierwisch relates the concept of generative grammar to cognitive sciences. The

author referred generative grammar as an explicit, formal characterization of the

knowledge determining the formal aspect of all kinds of language behavior and explain

the properties of linguistic knowledge.

This research program extended, deepened, and simplified the insights and

knowledge of language. Bierwisch explained the increasing systematic insight into the

structure of the human language capacity as a species-specific component of the

biologically based cognitive endowment and that there are stages that systematically

characterize the formal properties of linguistic expressions. The first stage is assigned to

the concept grammatical transformation, which for some time led to the identification of

generative grammar with the more specific notion of transformational grammar. The

second stage relates to two levels of syntactic organization of an expression, the deep

and surface structure, determining the semantic and phonetic interpretation, respectively.

This research has strongly influenced discussions in formal semantics and

pragmatics, and the philosophy of language in general. Thus, this concept is beneficial to

sentence production since it covers the concept of the deep structure in transformational

generative grammar.
Carnie, Andrew, Sato, Yosuke, Siddiqi, Daniel. The Routledge Handbook of Syntax.

New York: Routledge, 2014