Chomsky's TG Grammar

Question

I wonder who could tell me the proccess that Chomsky esteblished he's TG Grammar Theory?

Planet Hopper · Accepted Answer

Right, this is what I would say if I got the q in a lesson:

-It's a nativist theory, meaning that it assumes that all human beings are born with a LAD Language Acquisition Device, some kind of a chip implanted in the brain. Rather optimistic because it assumes that all speakers are able to succeed or they're brain-damaged.

-Grammar is minimised to a set of short, sketchy combination pattern rules that actually ended up being the base of computational translation. These rules are called competence, they are somehow abstract but easy to understand. Sometimes I use them on the board. There is very little, if any, language-awareness talk in a TG lesson.

-So, the focus is performance, the other side of a dichotomy often understood in parallel with Saussure's Langue vs. Parole. Performance is the ability to generate (hence generative gr) sentences which are effective communicatively. Errors are welcome in a TG lesson. The mastery of generation-performance is achieved when you can interrelate the competence patterns and transform (hence the T in TG) one into another. Many modern textbooks contain this kind of transformation exercise.

-Further research on the TG track has led to coin concepts such as socio-ling competence, communicative competence, strategic competence, etc.

Right now, the educational public systems in mainland europe are attempting to bring bilingualism into the schools, and they are regarding TG as a nice, encouraging theory to apply, though the theory itself started in 1957 in the US.

Cheers,

PH

Chineselindsay · Answer

Thank u for your answering!
It is really helpful..

Planet Hopper · Answer

Thanks to you, Lindsay

I'm always glad to be helpful

PH

Anonymous · Answer

In fact, I think TG may be explained in a more imaginative way.
People usually say Chomsky led a revolution in linguistics. I don't totally agree with that. If we are more creative, we can find the trace:
After Sassure, linguistics was already a science, and every student in that field might talkand think about the difference between langue and parole. So did Chomsky. He was also quite certain that there was an abstracted something lying under the surface just as langue to parole, bu he was frustrated by telling langue from parole in the end.'this is impossible, should we define sentence as langue or parole?'he asked himself. He decided to put this away. ‘but there must be something underneath, down the surface’, he said to himself, ‘if there’s no such thing as langue to observe, I should find out the real essence. And what is that?’ He thought about this for a long time. Where is language from? From human beings. So the words they utter, just like the parole act as the surface, and deep down, deep down, lies some common structure. You see, these structures are not many and limited. It is form them that come the variable unlimited sentences. So they are the essence. Chomsky was now a bit excited, so he continued his serach in mind. But how do people learn them? He also remembered that he himself could speak naturally at a very young age. So this is not learned, this is a gift born to have. He called it ‘UG’, universal Grammar. With this UG, people can speak and express themselves. This shared gift is a magical ability that he called ‘competence’, while opposite to this ability lies the actural ‘performance’. In this way, Chomsky fumbled out several concepts: UG, competence and performance, deep structure and surface structure.
To demostrate that he had already found out the essence, the law, he began to describe them one by one, on the basis of the sentences or the parole. He called this TG, transformational Grammar. In the beginning, it was a great success. But very soon, peopl noticed the laws he had proposed were not really applicable all the time, so Chomsky had to make out more laws for better explaination
Well, I think this is basically how he had the idea of UG, TG and GB and more.
I mean, Chomsky is a real scientist. For all the years, he never stops proving his hypothesis. He may be at the wrong side if his question is concerned, but he did give the world more than he had expected.

Chomsky's TG Grammar

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