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Transforms Without Kernels?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Werner Winter
Werner Winter*
Affiliation:
University of Texas; Universität Kiel
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Extract

On page 72 of his Syntactic structures, Noam Chomsky writes:

One of the nominalizing transformations will be the transformation TAdj which operates on any string of the form

(71) T – N–is – Adj (i.e., article – noun – is – adjective)

and converts it into the corresponding noun phrase of the form T + Adj + N. Thus, it converts “the boy is tall” into “the tall boy,” etc. It is not difficult to show that this transformation simplifies the grammar considerably, and that it must go in this, not the opposite direction. When we formulate this transformation properly, we find that it enables us to drop all adjective-noun combinations from the kernel, reintroducing them by TAdj.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 41 , Issue 3: July-September , September 1965 , pp. 484 - 489
Copyright
Copyright © 1965 by Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 Attention has been called to the existence of adjectives occurring only in the predicate—for English by Robert B. Lees, The grammar of English nominalizations 16, and for German by Wolfgang Motsch, Syntax des deutschen Adjektivs (Studia grammatica III) 21—but the implications for the general approach are not stated.

2 A detailed discussion of exclusively predicative and exclusively attributive adjectives in German is found in Hennig Brinkmann, Die deutsche Sprache 109–15.

3 I am greatly indebted to A. A. Hill for some suggestions and critical comments and for a chance to read the manuscript of his unpublished article Modifiers and construction-heads: Tagmemic and transformational relations. In this paper, which I was unable to hear when it was presented orally at the 1964 meeting of the Linguistic Society, Hill discusses data quite different from mine, but arrives at conclusions which seem to show a significant overlap with those of the present article.

I am furthermore grateful to Emmon Bach for detailed critical remarks. Though our discussions had as their immediate result only an agreement to disagree, his comments helped very much to put into proper relief the crucial differences between the inductive approach of the empiricist and the deductive one of the theoretician.