乔姆斯基的早期句法理论与当前语言学界的争鸣

Current Issues on Chomsky’s Early Syntactic Theory

一、乔姆斯基的论证与转换层次的提出 本世纪五十年代初期,语言学领域开始出现两种生成语法模式:有限状态语法(finitestate grammar)和短语结构语法(phrase struc-ture grammar)。

This paper attempts to review the debate between the transformational grammarians and GeraldGazdar. The point at issue is whether the transformational level is necessary in the description ofnatural languages. In his Syntactic Structures, Chomsky demonstrated that Finite State Grammar and Phrase Struc-ture Grammar were not powerful enough to describe natural languages. As a result, transformationalrules were introduced to increase its generative capacity. Around 1970, Stanley Peters and Robert Ritchie showed that Transformational Grammarwas in essence an unrestricted rewriting system, and its generative capacity was too strong. Thisgave rise to dozens of alternatives to Transformational Grammar, among which Gazdar'sapproach is the most attractive. He and his associates have shown that the phenomena classicallydescribed by means of Topicalization and other transformations can in fact be characterized by phrasestructure grammars, and the transformational apparatus can thus be given up.