grammar help needed

[Garry Nelson's Left Foot]

I teach my students that the active is when the Subject is 'doing' the action, and the passive is when the action is 'being done' to the subject. The passive is formed by a past tense of 'be' and the past participle of the verb. For example:

The Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre.

The thief stole the mona lisa from the louvre.

My students, of course, look at me blankly, so I then change the topic of the lesson to shopping or sport. Perhaps you could do the same and change your essay to sport?

 

[Gwylan]

I much prefer Chomsky's concept of transformational generative grammar to all this stuff that tries to squeeze English usage into a linguistic model designed to make sense of Latin.
...

Hmmm...I had to study bloody Chomsky for my degree and I can only say that I preferred doing Latin. Do you think that this is easier?

Chomsky's rule for relating active and passive sentences (as given in Syntactic Structures) is:

NP1-Aux-V-NP2 = NP2 - Aux + be + en - V - by + NP2

This rule, called the passive transformation, presupposes and depends upon the prior application of a set of phrase-structure rules. For simplicity, the passive transformation may first be considered in relation to the set of terminal strings generated by the phrase-structure rules (1)-(8) given earlier. The string "the + man + will + hit + the + ball" (with its associated phrase marker, as shown in Figure 4) can be treated not as an actual sentence but as the structure underlying both the active sentence "The man will hit the ball" and the corresponding passive "The ball will be hit by the man." The passive transformation is applicable under the condition that the underlying, or "input," string is analyzable in terms of its phrase structure as NP - Aux - V - NP (the use of subscript numerals to distinguish the two NPs in the formulation of the rule is an informal device for indicating the operation of permutation). In the phrase marker in Figure 4 "the" + "man" are constituents of NP, "will" is a constituent of Aux, "hit" is a constituent of V, and "the" + "ball" are constituents of NP. The whole string is therefore analyzable in the appropriate sense, and the passive transformation converts it into the string "the + ball + will + be + en + hit + by + the + man." A subsequent transformational rule will permute "en + hit" to yield "hit + en," and one of the morphophonemic rules will then convert "hit + en" to "hit" (as "ride + en" will be converted to "ridden"; "open + en" to "opened," and so on).



Crystal clear innit?

 

[Garry Nelson's Left Foot]

Hmmm...I had to study bloody Chomsky for my degree and I can only say that I preferred doing Latin. Do you think that this is easier?

Chomsky's rule for relating active and passive sentences (as given in Syntactic Structures) is:

NP1-Aux-V-NP2 = NP2 - Aux + be + en - V - by + NP2

This rule, called the passive transformation, presupposes and depends upon the prior application of a set of phrase-structure rules. For simplicity, the passive transformation may first be considered in relation to the set of terminal strings generated by the phrase-structure rules (1)-(8) given earlier. The string "the + man + will + hit + the + ball" (with its associated phrase marker, as shown in Figure 4) can be treated not as an actual sentence but as the structure underlying both the active sentence "The man will hit the ball" and the corresponding passive "The ball will be hit by the man." The passive transformation is applicable under the condition that the underlying, or "input," string is analyzable in terms of its phrase structure as NP - Aux - V - NP (the use of subscript numerals to distinguish the two NPs in the formulation of the rule is an informal device for indicating the operation of permutation). In the phrase marker in Figure 4 "the" + "man" are constituents of NP, "will" is a constituent of Aux, "hit" is a constituent of V, and "the" + "ball" are constituents of NP. The whole string is therefore analyzable in the appropriate sense, and the passive transformation converts it into the string "the + ball + will + be + en + hit + by + the + man." A subsequent transformational rule will permute "en + hit" to yield "hit + en," and one of the morphophonemic rules will then convert "hit + en" to "hit" (as "ride + en" will be converted to "ridden"; "open + en" to "opened," and so on).



Crystal clear innit?

 

[Lord Bracknell]

The point is, though, that a two year old child understands that rule. Because a two year old child understands the language enough to start speaking it.

Rules about 'active' and 'passive' don't help a two year old to speak or understand anything.

 

[Mental Lental]

Chomsky's theories are nearly 50 years old now and considered by most current linguists to be out of date. There are too many aspects of language that cannot be accounted for with respect to generative grammar, namely the large amount of idiomasticity in language. For instance, there is no way a phrase like 'kick the bucket' could be understood as meaning 'dead' by analysing its component parts. Generative grammarians would claim that idioms like this are 'aberrations' to the rules of generative grammar and as such are 'exceptions to the rule', to be learnt 'seperately'. This is a convenient way of 'brushing under the carpet' aspects of language that dont conform to the theory. Over the past 20 years many linguist have shown that there are a large number of whole sentances that have aspects of meaning when viewed as a whole that can not be obtained when you break down a sentance into all of its component parts.

Basically Chomsky is wrong, you cant explain language by using maths. If language was a logical, algebraic type equation than we could teach computers to speak it, and attempts in the worlds of AI to do this have been laughable.

Here's a link to good old wikipedia regarding a newer theory of grammar that attempts account for ALL aspects of language as opposed to Chomsky's generative grammar, which doesn't.

Up yours Chomsky!

Oh and he has a really stupid name too.