The Syntactic Component in a Transformational Grammar

Abstract

The syntactic component is the central component in a transformational grammar and the generative source that plays the role of mediating the pairing of meanings to pronunciations of all and only the sentences of a language by generating an infinite set of abstract strings of formatives (i.e. minimal syntactically functioning units) with their structural descriptions. The structural descriptions of the abstract strings of formatives, as we shall see, consist of hierarchically organized nderlying and superficial phrase markers, which serve as inputs to the semantic and phonological components respectively. The semantic and phonological components assign concrete meanings and pronunciations to sentences on the basis of their two different phrase markers given as the output of the syntactic component. The superficial phrase markers are derived from the underlying phrase markers by grammatical transformations to be discussed later in the paper.