164 CHAPTER 5
The passive form of this sentence reverses the order of subject and object,
modifies the verb phrase, and adds the prepositionby,converting the subject to
an object of the preposition, as in sentence 3:
- Fritz was kissed by Macarena. (passive)
Although these sentences do not look the same, Chomsky argued that they
express the same meaning and that the passive form is based on the active form.
Phrase-structure grammar does not address the connection between such sen-
tences; in fact, it would assign different sentence grammars to them:
Sentence 2:
SÆNP VPVPÆV NPSentence 3:
NP be –en V PPPPÆprep NPPrepÆbyIn Chomsky’s view, this approach fails to explain what our intuition tells
us is obvious: These sentences are closely related. Sentence 2 somehow has
been transformed into sentence 3. However, the only way to get at that rela-
tion was with a grammar that examined thehistory of sentences,one that
looked beneath the surface and into what we may think of asmentalese—
language as it exists in the mind before it reaches its final form, before it is
transformed. In other words, Chomsky was keenly interested in exploring
how peopleproducelanguage, and in this respect he was quite different
from the structuralists.
Chomsky proposed that the ability to look into the history of a sentence
gives a grammar agenerative componentthat reveals something about lan-
guage production—about how people connect strings of words into sen-
tences—but it also, he argued, allows us to understand something about how
the mind operates. On these grounds, Chomsky developed a grammar that
claimed a cognitive orientation because it focused on the transformation of
mentalese into actual language. His goal was to develop a theory of language
that provided a theory of mind. His theory of language was inherent in his
grammar, which he calledtransformational-generative(T-G) grammar.