Re: Transformational-generative grammar?


Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Young Sociolinguist wrote:

jimbo.tyson@xxxxxxxxx napisal(a):
sonjaaa@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
What are the best textbooks on TGG, starting from basic introductions
and going to more advanced? I'm specifically interested in the context
of machine translation.

Sonja Elen Kisa

TGG is now a historical term - for most people anyway. You can
probably still find copies of Andrew Radford's _Transformational
Syntax: a student's guide to Chomsky's extended standard theory_ around
and probably quite cheap.

If you want an textbook for contemporary transformational grammar then
I'd recommend Radford's more recent book _Syntax: a minimalist
introduction_ or
_Transformational Grammar : A First Course_ by Andrew Radford, S. R.
Anderson, J. Bresnan, and B. Comrie. All from Cambridge University
Press.

Jim

Radford wrote an almost comprehensive guide to the subject, entitled
"Transformational Grammar" (in the red series published by Cambridge
UP), including exercises, etc. What I can't recall, however, is the
application of the theory presented to machine/computer translation.
The latter is presented in "Introduction to Language" by Fromkin and
Rodman, a bulky handbook of linguistics in general. The book isn't new,
though, so unless it has been revised since the early nineties when it
was first published, it may be of little relevance now. As to books in
French, helas, je ne sais pas.

Radford has so far written at least 4 (possibly 5) introductions to the
successive versions of Chomsky's syntaxes, in the Cambridge Textbooks in
Linguistics series. They are remarkably clear and understandable, even
when what they are presenting is the most arrant nonsense.

Is it his own interpretation of the theory or the theory itself that is
sheer nonse?





Fromkin & Rodman (now in its 7th or so edition) is neither bulky nor a
handbook; it is an elementary textbook of linguistics, intended for
non-majors.

Maybe "contemporary linguistic analysis" by O'Grady and Dobrovolsky is
a better intro.


There is an excellent series of *Handbooks* of Linguistics from
Blackwell (I have a chapter in the *Handbook of Linguistics* _tout
court_), including ones on syntax, semantics, bilingualism, and applied
linguistics. They're mostly rather technical.



Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx

.

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