The Apparatus of Sublanguage Transformations

Abstract

The use of transformational methods to obtain sublanguage formulas, while new to linguistics, presents less of a novelty than might first be thought. This is seen in respect to both point of origin and method. Historically, transformations were arrived at by examining the dependence between the successive sentences of a discourse. The dependence consists in the recurrence in particular positions of particular words (or word-sequences) within the word classes of the successive sentence structures. Transformations, in their initial formulation, are a relation between sentences preserving selection (normal range of cooccurrents). In subsequent characterizations, including the operator grammar discussed in Chapter 2, and further below, transformations state a paraphrastic relation between sentences. The restriction to semantical notions concerning the equality (paraphrase) or difference among sentences is what has been called “weak” or “differential” semantics and does not entail any hypostatization of “meanings” (Henry Hiż, “The Role of Paraphrase in Grammar,” Monograph Series in Languages and Linguistics, No. 17, 1964).