Conditions on Transformations, 1973

The framework of Transformational Grammar used in the 1960s and early 1970s made use of a set of phrase structure rules to generate an underlying Deep Structure, and a set of transformational rules that modified this structure in various ways. While this framework generated a wide range of productive work in characterizing the grammar of particular languages, there was a concern that the system was too powerful in that it could express both natural and unnatural patterns. Conditions on Transformations, along with other work in the 1970s, provided an answer to this concern, uncovering and formulating constraints on the application of transformational rules. Knowledge of a language can be expressed in the form of a system of rules (a grammar) that generates the language. The chapter considers conditions on the functioning of grammars once again, specifically, conditions on how transformations apply.