A Transformational Grammar is organized in three basic parts. The first part—its syntactic component (which includes a lexicon, i.e. a list of words — boy, hit, ball, etc.) is described, as mentioned above, in terms of IC's or P-markers. The syntactic component includes description both of deep and surface structure. The second is the semantic component, which provides a semantic interpretation of the deep structure. E. g. in sentences we enjoy smoking and we oppose smoking the semantic component would indicate that the former is a paraphrase of we smoke and we enjoy it, though the latter is not a paraphrase of we smoke and we oppose it. The third, the phonological component provides a phonetic interpretation of the surface structure of the sentence.
Note that "to generate sentences" according to this theory does not mean "to produce sentences", but "to characterize", "to enumerate", "to determine" the rules for forming all of the infinite number of sentences, some of them never heard before.
Chomsky's new theory is that language has a base which contains the elementary phrase structures. In the new conception of Chomsky the kernel sentence loses all its significance, for Chomsky is careful to stress that sentences are not derived from other sentences (as has been sometimes loosely and inaccurately stated), but rather from the structures underlying them. The phrase structures produce sentences usually by way of transformations. . . Now it is clearer that transformations are not intended to relate sentences to sentences (as was stated at first by Z. S. Harris), but deep structure to surface structure and that deep structure thus embodies a hypothesis set up for an adequate description of a language.
Our selections from transformational grammars of English represent the earlier version of the transformational theory, even O. Thomas' Transformational Grammar, the first popular survey published since the major revision.
Of great interest for clarifying the theoretical and philosophical sources of transformational generative grammar are the two books by Chomsky: Cartesian Linguistics and Language and Mind.
It is also an interesting fact that some linguists point at the danger of new prescriptivism in generative transformational grammars, e. g. J. Nist maintains that in their search for language universals (that is, categories underlying the structures of all languages), a process reminiscent of the eighteenth century authoritarians, the generative grammarians have already showed signs of becoming prescriptive and prescriptive in their analysis of "permitted" (i. e. grammatically correct) strings. This opinion is shared by B. Hathaway.
In the process of the development of English grammatical theory, despite the great divergence of the types, aims, objectives and approaches of English grammars, a certain continuity may be observed in establishing and keeping up the English grammatical tradition. The foundations of the English grammatical system were laid already in the first part of the first, prescientific, period, in early prenormative grammar, though its morphological system leaned heavily on that of the Latin grammar and the incipient syntactic notions were dependent upon rhetoric and logic. The most important type of grammar, in our opinion, is the second, the prescriptive or normative grammar, which has the longest tradition, as it arose in the mideighteenth century and still dominates class room instruction. Its most significant contribution to English grammatical theory was the syntactic system evolved in the midnineteenth century.
The three types of scientific grammars of English discussed here have not quite succeeded in creating any really independent or new grammatical notions and systems. The interests of the scholars centered found the grammatical system of prescriptive grammar. They either elaborated it further (in classical scientific grammar) or refuted it, retaining at the same time some of its ideas (in structural grammar) or acknowledged its merits as an implicit transformational grammar and reformulated its ideas (in transformational grammar).
Both modern schools of grammar show a marked tendency towards morphological labelling of syntactic units, which may be viewed as a: revival of the grammatical notions of the earliest grammars when the syntactic system was practically non-existent.