Transformacia kak metod lingvističeskogo analiza

Extract

‘Transformation as a technique for linguistic analysis’, by G. G. Pocheptsov, The Kiev Pedagogical Institute for Foreign Languages, Kiev, U.S.S.R. Abstract (by the Editor). Despite the intensive development of transformational theory in the last ten years, certain fundamental questions have not yet been answered. In particular, the notion of ‘structural meaning’ has not been clarified, and criteria are lacking for deciding whether a given transformational difference is ‘structural’. The author distinguishes two kinds of structural meanings associated with grammatical units: ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’. The former belong to the surface-structure of language, and were the primary concern of the traditional theory of the parts of speech and parts of the sentence; the latter belong to deep-structure, and traditional grammar did not have the apparatus required for their investigation – transformations. The most interesting transformations are those which ‘translate’ implicit meanings into explicit: e.g., the NP, Ms book, in This book is easy to read has the implicit meaning ‘object’, by contrast with this boy in This boy is eager to read. Both sentences may be transformationally ‘reduced’ to the same surface-structure, N V Da. (This book reads easily, This boy reads eagerly): but the structural conditions for the application of the transformations are not identical. The author discusses each sentence in relation to other characteristic transformational possibilities. Finally, the following fundamental types of transformation are distinguished, and illustrated from English: (a) those which establish both a difference of IC structure and a difference between the syntactic relations of the constituents; (b) those which formalize differences in the implicit structural meanings of constituents; (c) those which establish differences between sentence-constituents at the level of word classes and subclasses. Transformational analysis is of relatively small importance in the investigation of ‘lexico-derivational’ and ‘lexico-phraseological’ constraints. It is a valuable method of analysis, but must not be extended beyond its domain of relevance.