17a. Fred bought a thong swimsuit/the fact that Fred bought a thong swimsuit hor-
rified his motherThe Slow Demise of T-G Grammar
These analyses are not particularly satisfying, and they presage what lies
ahead. From the beginning, T-G grammar proposed that its focus on the history
of sentences was a significant strength. But as the previous discussion suggests,
reconciling deep structure with surface structure presents numerous problems.
If we were to move further into the grammar, we would see that these problems
become more severe, forcing increasingly ad hoc—or even far-fetched—ex-
planations of deep structure.
As Chomsky initially formulated the grammar, there was a clear separa-
tion between syntax and semantics, yet sentences like 16 and 17 indicate that
this separation is artificial and unsatisfactory. The relative pronoun’s chief
syntactic function in sentences is to link the dependent and independent
clauses. However, it also has a clear semantic component that cannot be de-
scribed in the grammar. One result is that the transformation rule presented on
page 175 for relative clauses does not work for sentences 15 through 17. It is
possible to formulate additional rules to account for sentences 15 and 16, but
such rules would be contrary to the goal of T-G grammar to provide general
rather than specific rules. It is not possible to formulate an additional rule for
sentence 17 because transformation rules do not, and cannot, address issues
of semantic content. Consequently, we have to rely on intuition and guess-
work to analyze the deep structure of such sentences and we also must rely on
an ever-expanding set of ad hoc constraints to account for linguistic features
that cannot be expressed in transformation rules. Such a reliance is not desir-
able in T-G grammar, which from the beginning strove to eliminate guess-
work through a rigorous formulation of the grammar. It is one of several
problems with T-G grammar that has not been satisfactorily solved. Add to
this the fact that work in psychology and neuroscience failed to find any evi-
dence for the existence of transformation rules (see Williams, 1998, for a
summary), and the basis for T-G grammar seems suspect.
THE MINIMALIST PROGRAMChomsky was aware of the noted problems fairly early, but he so vigorously op-
posed other linguists’ efforts to solve them that the ensuing debate came to be
called “the linguistics wars” (Harris, 1993). The role of meaning in a theory of
language and grammar was at the heart of the debate. Many linguists argued
that a viable theory of language must be able to account for meaning. Chomsky,
182 CHAPTER 5