Transformational grammar

A theory of grammar in which transformations relate underlying structures to the forms of sentences. Its best-known version was developed by Noam Chomsky and has changed substantially over time.

Deep structure: An abstract syntactic representation proposed in early generative grammar, associated with a sentence’s grammatical relations and interpretation. Early transformational grammar used this representation as the input to syntactic transformations.
Noam Chomsky: An American linguist and cognitive scientist whose work founded modern generative grammar. His 1957 book introduced transformational-generative grammar in a widely influential form.
Syntax: The system of principles governing how words combine into phrases and sentences. Transformational grammar is a formal theory of syntactic structure.
Dependency grammar: A syntactic framework that represents sentence structure through directed relations between words, especially head–dependent links. It analyzes grammatical relations without relying on transformational derivations between underlying and surface structures.
Surface structure: The syntactic representation of a sentence after transformations have applied in early generative grammar. It captures the sentence form produced from an underlying structure.
Syntactic Structures: Noam Chomsky’s 1957 book proposing a formal account of syntax using phrase structure and transformations. It established the early framework that made transformational grammar prominent.
Constituent: A word or group of words that functions as a unit within a sentence’s syntactic structure. Transformations operate on constituents and their positions in sentence representations.
Lexical-Functional Grammar: A nontransformational grammatical framework that represents syntax through interacting structures, including constituent and functional representations. It models grammatical relations without deriving sentence forms through transformational movement.
Syntactic transformation: A formal operation that maps one syntactic representation to another in a grammar. Transformations are the defining operations that relate structures in the theory.
The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory: A manuscript by Noam Chomsky, completed in 1955 and published in 1975, presenting an extensive theory of generative syntax. It develops the theoretical foundations behind the framework introduced in his earlier book.

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