A linguistic theory developed by Noam Chomsky in opposition to a behaviorist account of language based on the work of his teacher Zellig Harris (1909-1992), and initially formulated in his book Syntactic structures (1957). In essence, it provides a methodology for describing the relationships between sentences expressing similar concepts to underlying ‘deep structures’ by means of various transformational rules and phrase structures. Central to Chomsky’s theory is that humans are innately predisposed to language abilities, and that such transformational rules are linguistic universals. The conductor, Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), tried in 1976 to use the theory in arguing for the existence of musical universals in his book The unanswered question based on the Norton Lectures (1973) he gave at Harvard University. While generative grammar defines rules that can generate the infinite number of well-formed grammatical sentences possible in a language based on a rationalist standpoint, transformational grammar attempts to identify the transformations governing relations between parts of a sentence, based on the assumption that a fundamental structure underneath such grammatical features as word order. Together, transformational and generative grammar provided an enormous impetus for the establishment of present-day approaches to linguistics. While Chomsky and followers have abandoned much of the original content of transformational grammar, it continues to be fruitfully applied in syntactic analysis and in the study of children’s language development. Currently, the Chomskyan approach to linguistics is best labeled transformational-generative grammar (TGG). There are a number of rules associated with TGG. Perhaps the simplest is the head initial/final rule. In head initial, the head occurs before its argument as in, for example
Saw a dog (verse phrase), completion of an essay (noun phrase), and on the table (prepositional phrase). With the head occurring after its argument, examples of head final are
bravely done (verb phrase) and the big black dog (noun phrase). While there are exceptions, most languages incorporate only one of these structures. For example, Japanese is a head final language, while English is a head initial language, and on the whole somewhat more languages are head final.
See Competence (linguistics), Cognitive-functionalist approach, Deep and surface structure, Generative grammar approach, Linguistics, Syntax, Systemic functional linguistics