The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018

Transformational linguistics

Transformational linguistics: One of the two components of American linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory of linguistics, which he postulated in Syntactic Structures (1957). Chomsky’s theory is termed transformational in its premise that a certain set of transformative rules produces numerous variations on “kernel sentences” (basic sentences) in the “deep structure” of any given language. For example, various transformative rules in English allow us to take the kernel sentence “Tom chased Jerry” and modify it. We can make it passive (“Jerry was chased by Tom”), turn it into a question (e.g., “Was Tom chasing Jerry?”), make it imperative (“Tom, chase Jerry!”), and so forth.