Classroom management and teacher-student

FOCUS ON THE TEACHER

CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT AND TEACHER - STUDENT INTERACTION

A FINAL PAPER

Submitted as the requirement of final project of

“ APPLIED LINGUISTICS “

Supervisored by :

DR. H. GUNADI H. SULISTYO, MA

By :

AHMAD JAZULY

NIM : 2091040186

Class : C ( Banyuwangi )

ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY OF MALANG

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH EDUCATION

FEBRUARY, 2011

CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT AND TEACHER - STUDENT INTERACTION

1. INTRODUCTION

Classroom management and teacher-student interaction are integral to sound methodological practice, as we see in this chapter. In particular, I focus on the language which teachers use. Teacher talk is of crucial importance, not only for the organization of the classroom but also for the processes of acquisition. It is important for the organization and management of classroom because it is though language that teachers either succeed or fail to implement their teaching plans. In terms of acquisition, teacher talk is important because it is probably the major source of comprehensible target language input the learner is likely to receive.

In the first part of the chapter, we look the theory and research into the amount and type of teacher talk, speech modification and its effect on comprehension, teacher questions, explanations and error correction. In succeeding sections, we see how this theory and research can inform and guide our understanding of classroom practices. Key questions addressed in the chapter include :

1.      What does classroom research say about the amount and type of teacher talk ?

2.      Do some types of teacher speech modifications facilitate comprehension more than others ?

3.      How can teachers improve the effectiveness of their questioning techniques ?

4.      What types of question stimulate students to maximize their output ?

5.      How can teachers provide effective feedback to students on their behavior and language ?

6.      What is the effect of digressions and extemporizations ?     

2. DISCUSSION

This part of discussion covers classroom management and teacher-student interaction are integral to sound methodological practice ; about the amount and type of teacher talk, types of teacher questions and feedback to students on their behavior and language.

2.1. Amount and type of teacher talk

It is not surprising that in all sorts of classrooms, not only those devoted to the teaching and learning of languages, it is the teacher who does by far the most talking. However, teachers who obtain an objective record of their teaching by recording and reviewing their lessons are generally surprised by just how much talking they do.

In an in-service programme in which teachers were asked to record and analyses one of their lessons, one of the most frequent comments made by teacher asked what surprised them most, was the amount of talking they did. (For an account of this programme, see Nunan 1990.) Of course, whether or not it is considered a good thing for teachers to spend 70 or 80 per sent of class time talking will depend on the objectives of a lesson and where it fits into the overall scheme of the course or programme.

1. Young bilingual children can't keep their languages separate; they use both at the same time: they are obviously confused.

At some stage, most bilingual children use sounds and words from both languages in the same utterances or conversations even though the people talking with them are using only one language. Some parents and early childhood educators are concerned when they hear this because they believe that it means that the child is confused and cannot separate the two languages. Research shows that this is not true. The main reason for children mixing their languages in these ways is because they lack sufficient vocabulary in one or both languages to express themselves entirely in each language. Thus, they borrow from the other language. Indeed, this is an effective communication strategy in most families because parents and other adults who care for bilingual children usually understand both languages and may mix the languages themselves when talking with the child.

Bilingual adults in some communities mix their languages extensively. Research has shown that the most proficient bilinguals mix the most and in the most sophisticated ways without violating the rules of either language. It is normal for children growing up in these communities to mix their languages extensively because they are simply learning the patterns of communication that are common in their community.

In any case, mixing languages is a natural and normal aspect of early bilingual acquisition, even among proficient adult bilinguals. Parents should not try to stop their children from mixing. Bilingual children will naturally stop doing it, unless of course mixing is a frequent form of language use in the community.

2. Using both languages in the same sentence or -conversation is had. Parents can discourage and even prevent their children from doing, this doing by making sure that each of them uses one and only one language with their child at all times. The same goes for other adults who interact with the child.

Research has shown that most bilingual children mix their languages sometimes no matter how much their parents mix, for the reasons mentioned earlier. As well, most parents mix their languages when talking with their young children because it is a natural and effective way of communicating with on-, another and their children. Because mixing, languages is common among people who are bilingual, it can be difficult and unnatural, if not impossible, to keep the languages completely separate. If most people in the children's wider community use only one language, then there is probably no reason to worry about how much parents or children mix; the children will eventual learn the monolingual patterns.

3. What are the most important thins for parents or early childhood educators to know about early childhood bilingualism ?

There are number of important things to keep in mind :

ü  Bilingual acquisition is a common and normal childhood experience

ü  All children are capable of learning two languages in childhood

ü  Knowing, the language of one's parents is an important and essential component of children's cultural identity and sense of belonging

ü  Bilingual acquisition is facilitated if children have sustained, rich, and varied experiences in both languages

ü  Proficiency in both languages is more likely if children have sustained exposure in the home to the language that is used less extensively in the community; the language that is used more widely will get support outside the home

ü  Parents can facilitate bilingual proficiency by using the language they know best and by using it in varied and extensive ways

2.2. The Child's Language Background

There are many different ways in which children can be exposed to a second language. For some children, two languages are present in the home from birth. For other children, exposure to a second language begins once they enter early childhood education programs. It is customary in the literature to distinguish between children who learn two languages simultaneously and children who learn one language after their first language is established. Because so much of language development occurs before the age of three, the usual convention is to divide children at that point. If the second language is introduced before age three, children are thought to be learning the two languages simultaneously; after the age of three, they are engaged in sequential bilingualism ( Genesee, 2002 ) lie further explain that children differ in their exposure to their languages. Some children receive a great deal of exposure to two languages, whereas for other children one language predominates. In addition, children may be in an environment where the two languages are intermixed in normal adult Speech. This practice of "code-switching" is prevalent in many Spanish – speaking  communities in California and Texas. Moreover, in migrant Latino families, children may move from one country to another, so that there is a great deal of exposure to English as a second language at some periods, and no exposure at other times.

At the risk of simplifying, these complexities we can study a typology bilingual Development Based on Conditions of Exposure and Use as listed in table 1. In this table, Type 1 bilingualism represents the case of children who are simultaneously bilingual in the sense that both languages develop equally or nearly equally as they are exposed to both and have good opportunities to use both. Although perfectly balanced bilinguals are rare, many children in early childhood education programs have been exposed to two languages and use both. For example, many children speak Spanish with their parents and older relatives, but English with their siblings and other children. Type 2 represents children who have had high exposure to a second language throughout their lives, but have had little opportunity to use the language. For example, many migrant children from Mexico hear English on television, in stores and so on, but use Spanish in everyday communication. When they enter early childhood education programs, these children are likely to make rapid progress in English comprehension skills has been developed.

Table 1 : A Typology of Bilingual Development Based on Conditions of

                Exposure and Use

		Subsequent Experience
		High Opportunity / motivation for use of both languages:	Low    opportunity / motivation for use of both languages:
Prior Experience	High exposure to both languages :	Simultaneous Bilingualism (Type 1)	Receptive Bilingualism (Type 2)
	Low exposure to one language :	Rapid Sequential Bilingualism ('Type 3)	Slow Sequential Bilingualism (Type 4)

(Adapted from Barry McLaughlin; Antoinette Gesi Blanchard ; Yuka Osanai. 2000)

Types 3 and 4 represent children who are learning a second language sequentially, that is, after the first language is established. Type 3 children have also had little exposure to English before entering early childhood education programs, but they use English as much as they can and so are likely to be more rapid learners than are Type 4 children. In the case of Type 4 children, there has been little prior exposure to English and they have few opportunities -or avail themselves of few opportunities-to use English.

Individual differences in the use children make of the opportunities to use a second language have been noted by many observers. Some children not only use the language as much as possible, but they are "high input generators" in the sense that they get people around them to use English in ways that are most helpful to their learning. Other children tend not to use the language very much and as a result do not get as much help as they could.

2.3. Language Development in Bilingual Children

Most educators know something about the language development of native English - speaking children. There is a vast literature on the topic, and the benchmarks of language development have been plotted for monolingual children; however, no such benchmarks are available for bilingual children. Children follow different paths to become bilingual and the stages that they pass through can be quite varied.

2.3.1. Stages of Development

Currently researchers believe that there is a consistent developmental sequence that children follow in acquiring a first language. If the child acquires two languages simultaneously, the stages of development are the same as they are for monolingual speakers of those languages. There is debate over whether bilingualism results in a slower rate of vocabulary development than is true of children learning the same languages monolingually. Goodz, ( in McLaughlin 2001) reports no delay or retardation, but other researchers have reported lower vocabulary scores for bilingual than for monolingual children in a given language.

Typically, children who are learning two languages simultaneously make unequal progress in the languages. One language is more salient from time to time, either because of the input that the child is receiving from other speakers, or because there are more opportunities to use one language than the other. However, there is no simple relationship between a child's proficiency in each language and the amount of input in that language from caregivers and others Goodz, (in Mc. Laughlin, 2001).

For children who are learning a second language sequentially, the development progression is somewhat different. Tabors and Snow (in Mc. Laughlin, 2001) argue that such children pass through four distinct stages :

1.      First, the child uses the home language. When everyone around the child is speaking a different language, there are only two options-to speak the language they already know, or to stop speaking entirely. Many children, but not all, follow the first option for some period of time ( Saville-Troike, 1987). This of course leads to increasing frustration, and eventually children give up trying to make others understand their language.

2.      The second stage is the nonverbal period. After children abandon the attempt to communicate in their first language, they enter a period in which they do not talk at all. This can last for some time, or it can be a brief phase. Although they do not talk during this time, children attempt to communicate nonverbally to get help from adults or to obtain objects. Furthermore, this is a period during which children begin actively to crack the code of the second language. Saville-Troike (1987) noted that children will rehearse the target language by repeating what other speakers say in a low voice and by playing with the sounds of the new language.

3.      The next stage occurs when the child is ready to go public with the new language. There are two characteristics to this speech-it is telegraphic and it involves the use of formulas. Telegraphic speech is common in early monolingual language development and involves the use of a few content words without function words or morphological markers. For example, a young child learning to speak English may say "put paper" to convey the meaning, "I want to put the paper on the table." Formulaic speech refers to the use of unanalyzed chunks of words or routine phrases that are repetitions of what the child hears. Children use such prefabricated chunks long before they have any understanding of what they mean (Wong Fillmore in Mc. Laughlin, 2000).

4.      Eventually, the child reaches the stage of productive language use. At this point the child is able to go beyond short telegraphic utterances and memorized chunks. Initially, in English for example, children may form new utterances by using formulaic patterns such as " I wanna " with names for objects. In time, the child begins to demonstrate an understanding of the syntactic system of the language. Children gradually unpack-age their formulas and apply newly acquired syntactic rules to develop productive control over the language. Like any scheme of developmental stages, the sequence outlined here is flexible. At a given stage children have recourse to previously used strategies. Formulaic speech is still used in the stage of productive language use, for example. Rather than speaking of stages, it makes more sense to speak of waves, in that waves can be visualized as moving in and out, generally moving in one direction, but receding, then moving forward again ( Olsen Edwards in Mc. Laughlin, 2001 ). This seems to capture more accurately the child's development-in language and in other areas as well.

Furthermore, there are vast individual differences with respect to the rate at which children pass through the different stages. Some children go through a prolonged nonverbal stage, sometimes lasting for year or more, whereas other children pass through this stage so quickly they seem to have rejected this strategy altogether. Nora, ( in Ganesse, 2002) study, preferred to interact with English-speaking children and used every opportunity to engage in meaningful conversation in that language. Other learners in the same study chose to speak almost entirely with other children who understood their first language and so made little progress in the second language.

2.3.2. Language Mixing

Most observers -of children learning two languages simultaneously note that there is some mixing of languages at the lexical level. There is a great deal of controversy about how much mixing occurs and what it means. Recent research by Goodz 1994 in Mc. Laughlin, mixing 2000) suggests that mixing increases somewhat during early childhood, speaking at 30 months or so, and then declining. She followed 13 children and their parents and focused on the input the parents provided. In spite of parents' protestations to the contrary, observations indicated that they did not separate languages by person; rather, in all cases there were situations when parents used their nonnative language with the child. This research was done with French-English speakers in Canada; research with Mexican-American families in the United States indicates mixing is quite common in some communities.

Goodz ( in Mc. Laughlin, 2000 ) stated that in such communities mixing languages and switching from one language to another is pail of the child's normal linguistic environment. Language mixing and code switching are used for definite communicative needs. Speakers build on the coexistence of alternate forms in their language repertory to create meanings that may be highly idiosyncratic and understood only by members of the same bilingual speech community. In such communities adult code - switching is a rhetorical strategy used in such communicative tasks as persuading, explaining, requesting, and controlling. it is preferred to other rhetorical devices because it has greater semantic power deriving from metaphorical allusion to shared values and to the bilinguals common problems vis-a-vis the society at large.

A number of observers have noted that when bilinguals have been interacting mainly with other bilinguals for a long time, the model for each of their languages is not monolingual usage of these languages but rather the languages as spoken by the bilinguals themselves. In these situations, the mixed speech becomes a code of its own-"contact language" (Haugen, in Mc. Laughlin 2000) that is used to stress in-group behavior or emphasize informality or rapport.

It is important for educators in early childhood education programs to realize that language mixing ( inserting single lexical items from one language into another ) and code switching ( switching languages for at least a phrase or a sentence ) are common linguistic devices in many of the communities from which their students come. Rather than indicating that children are confusing their two languages, such phenomena can be a sign of linguistic vitality. Young children in such communities are in the process of learning to switch languages in the sophisticated manner they hear around them. Teachers who switch languages are merely adjusting their speech to the language of the child's community and culture.

2.3.3. Language Loss and Semilingualism

It sometimes happens that children lose their first language skills as the second language begins to predominate ( Wong ­Fillmore, in Mc. Laughlin, 2000 ). Because of the emphasis put on English in our schools and society, children can gradually lose aspects of their first language. This is -sometimes the case in immigrant families, where the parents are learning English and that language begins to predominate in the home.

Because, developmentally, children may be losing aspects of their first language as the second language is acquired, their performance on tests of language proficiency can be misleading.  At a given point in time, their skills in both languages may be relatively weak. This has led some researchers to talk of " semilingualim," a condition where children are not functioning well in either language. Indeed, language. one often hears teachers decrying the fact that bilingual children "don't know either language."

Most linguists would restrict the use of the term "semilingualism" to those cases where extreme social deprivation results in bilingual children not functioning well in either language. Although instances of extreme linguistic and communicative deprivation may lead to language pathology, usually what appears to be semilingualism is only a temporary phase in language development- Thus, as shown in Figure 1, there may be a developmental period when lack of use of the first language results in a decline in proficiency while at the same time knowledge of the second language is not yet at an age-appropriate level.

3. CONCLUSION

Based on the explanation above we can conclude that :

1.      There are two main factors affecting whether a child is monolingual, bilingual or multilingual. They are the family or the parents, and the community where they live.

2.      In exposing a second language, children may have different ways. For some children, two languages are present in the home from birth while for other children exposure to a second language begins once they enter early childhood education program. In this case, we can say that the process of acquiring a second language in early childhood can be done through formal and non formal education. Formal education learning a language at school while non formal education can be at home or outside of school environment.

3.      In the process of language development there are three possibilities that might happen toward the children : Firstly. Language mixing, that mixing of languages at some lexical levels. Secondly, Language loss in which children sometimes lose their first language skills as the second language begins to predominate.

REFERENCES

Barry Mclaughlin ; Antoinette Gesi Blanchard ; Yuka Osana. 2000.

Assessing Language Development in Bilingual Preschool Children

http;//www.ncela.gwu.edu

Genesee. Fred. 2002. Bilingual Acquisition.

webmaster,@earlychildhood.com.

Saville-Troike, M. 1987. "Bilingual discourse: The Negotiation of Meaning

Without a Common Code."

Great Britain ; Brazil Blackwell Publisher Limited.

MENTAL GRAMMAR

Title

MENTAL GRAMMAR

Author

Ahmad Jazuly

Biography:

Ahmad Jazuly has been a English teacher in Junior High School of Muhammadiyah 1 Jember, a Lecturer Information Technology, Technic Faculty in Muhammadiyah University of Jember. Indonesia

TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR

Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics Generative linguistics Phonology Morphology Syntax Lexis

Semantics Lexical semantics Statistical semantics Structural semantics Prototype semantics Pragmatics

Systemic functional linguistics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative grammar (TGG), is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskyan tradition. Additionally, transformational grammar is the Chomskyan tradition that gives rise to specific transformational grammars. Much current research in transformational grammar is inspired

by Chomsky’s Minimalist Program.[1]

Contents

1 Deep structure and surface structure 2 Development of basic concepts 3 Innate linguistic knowledge 4 Grammatical theories 5 “I-Language” and “E-Language” 6 Grammaticality 7 Minimalism 8 Mathematical representation 9 Transformations 10 References 11 See also 12 External links

Deep structure and surface structure

In 1957, Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, in which he developed the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation — a deep structure and a surface

structure.[2] [3] The deep structure represented the core semantic relations of a sentence, and was mapped on to the surface structure (which followed the phonological form of the sentence very closely) via transformations. Chomsky believed that there would be considerable similarities between languages’ deep structures, and that these structures would reveal properties, common to all languages, which were concealed by their surface structures. However, this was perhaps not the central motivation for introducing deep structure. Transformations had been proposed prior to the development of deep structure as a means of

increasing the mathematical and descriptive power of Context-free grammars. Similarly, deep structure was devised largely for technical reasons relating to early semantic theory.

Descriptive linguistics Phonetics Historical linguistics Comparative linguistics Etymology Sociolinguistics Corpus linguistics Applied linguistics Language acquisition Language development Language education

Psycholinguistics Neurolinguistics Linguistic anthropology Cognitive linguistics Computational linguistics Stylistics Prescription History of linguistics List of linguists Unsolved problems

Chomsky emphasizes the importance of modern formalmathematical devices in the development of grammatical theory:But the fundamental reason for [the] inadequacy of

traditional grammars is a more technical one. Although itwas well understood that linguistic processes are in somesense “creative”, the technical devices for expressing asystem of recursive processes were simply not availableuntil much more recently. In fact, a real understanding ofhow a language can (in Humboldt’s words) “make infiniteuse of finite means” has developed only within the lastthirty years, in the course of studies in the foundations ofmathematics.(Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, p. 8 [2])

Development of basic concepts

Though transformations continue to be important in Chomsky’scurrent theories, he has now abandoned the original notion ofDeep Structure and Surface Structure. Initially, two additionallevels of representation were introduced (LF — Logical Form,and PF — Phonetic Form), and then in the 1990s Chomskysketched out a new program of research known as Minimalism, inwhich Deep Structure and Surface Structure no longer featuredand PF and LF remained as the only levels of representation.To complicate the understanding of the development of Noam Chomsky’s theories, the precisemeanings of Deep Structure and Surface Structure have changed over time — by the 1970s, the twowere normally referred to simply as D-Structure and S-Structure by Chomskyan linguists. Inparticular, the idea that the meaning of a sentence was determined by its Deep Structure (taken to itslogical conclusions by the generative semanticists during the same period) was dropped for good byChomskyan linguists when LF took over this role (previously, Chomsky and Ray Jackendoff had begun to argue that meaning was determined by both Deep and Surface Structure).[4][5]

Innate linguistic knowledge

Terms such as “transformation” can give the impression that theories of transformational generative grammar are intended as a model for the processes through which the human mind constructs and understands sentences. Chomsky is clear that this is not in fact the case: a generative grammar models only the knowledge that underlies the human ability to speak and understand. One of the most important of Chomsky’s ideas is that most of this knowledge is innate, with the result that a baby can have a large body of prior knowledge about the structure of language in general, and need only actually learn the idiosyncratic features of the language(s) it is exposed to. Chomsky was not the first person to suggest that all languages had certain fundamental things in common (he quotes philosophers writing several centuries ago who had the same basic idea), but he helped to make the innateness theory respectable after a period dominated by more behaviorist attitudes towardslanguage. Perhaps more significantly, he made concrete and technically sophisticated proposals aboutthe structure of language, and made important proposals regarding how the success of grammatical theories should be evaluated. Chomsky goes so far as to suggest that a baby need not learn any actual rules specific to a particular language at all. Rather, all languages are presumed to follow the same set of rules, but the effects of these rules and the interactions between them can vary greatly depending on the values of certain universal linguistic parameters. This is a very strong assumption, and is one of the most subtle ways in which Chomsky’s current theory of language differs from most others.

Grammatical theories

In the 1960s, Chomsky introduced two central ideas relevant to the construction and evaluation of grammatical theories. The first was the distinction between competence and performance. Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors (e.g. starting a sentence and then abandoning it midway through). He argued that these errors in linguistic performance were irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence (the knowledge that allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences). Consequently, the linguist can study an idealised version of language, greatly simplifying linguistic analysis (see the “Grammaticalness” section below). The second idea related directly to the evaluation of theories of grammar. Chomsky made a distinction between grammars which achieved descriptive adequacy and those which went further and achieved explanatory adequacy. A descriptively adequate grammar for a particular language defines the (infinite) set of grammatical sentences in that language; that is, it describes the language in its entirety. A grammar which achieves explanatory adequacy has the additional property that it gives an insight into the underlying linguistic structures in the human mind; that is, it does not merely describe the grammar of a language, but makes predictions about how linguistic knowledge is mentally represented. For Chomsky, the nature of such mental representations is largely innate, so if a grammatical theory has explanatory adequacy it must be able to explain the various grammatical nuances of the languages of the world as relatively minor variations in the universal pattern of human language. Chomsky argued that, even though linguists were still a long way from constructing descriptively adequate grammars, progress in terms of descriptive adequacy would only come if linguists held explanatory adequacy as their goal. In other words, real insight into the structure of individual languages could only be gained through the comparative study of a wide range of languages, on the assumption that they are all cut from the same cloth.

“I-Language” and “E-Language”

In 1986, Chomsky proposed a distinction between I-Language and E-Language, similar but not identical to the competence/performance distinction.[6] (I-language) refers to Internal language and is contrasted with External Language (or E-language). I-Language is taken to be the object of study in linguistic theory; it is the mentally represented linguistic knowledge that a native speaker of a language has, and is therefore a mental object — from this perspective, most of theoretical linguistics is a branch of psychology. E-Language encompasses all other notions of what a language is, for example that it is a body of knowledge or behavioural habits shared by a community. Thus, E-Language is not itself a coherent concept[7], and Chomsky argues that such notions of language are not useful in the study of innate linguistic knowledge, i.e. competence, even though they may seem sensible and intuitive, and useful in other areas of study. Competence, he argues, can only be studied if languages are treated as mental objects.

Grammaticality

Further information: Grammaticality

Chomsky argued that the notions “grammatical” and “ungrammatical” could be defined in a

meaningful and useful way. In contrast an extreme behaviorist linguist would argue that language can only be studied through recordings or transcriptions of actual speech, the role of the linguist being to look for patterns in such observed speech, but not to hypothesize about why such patterns might occur, nor to label particular utterances as either “grammatical” or “ungrammatical”. Although few linguists in the 1950s actually took such an extreme position, Chomsky was at an opposite extreme, defining grammaticality in an unusually (for the time) mentalistic way.[8] He argued that the intuition of a native speaker is enough to define the grammaticalness of a sentence; that is, if a particular string of English words elicits a double take, or feeling of wrongness in a native English speaker, it can be said that the string of words is ungrammatical (when various extraneous factors affecting intuitions are controlled for). This (according to Chomsky) is entirely distinct from the question of whether a sentence is meaningful, or can be understood. It is possible for a sentence to be both grammatical and meaningless, as in Chomsky’s famous example “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”. But such sentences manifest a linguistic problem distinct from that posed by meaningful but ungrammatical (non)-sentences such as “man the bit sandwich the”, the meaning of which is fairly clear, but which no native speaker would accept as being well formed.

The use of such intuitive judgments permitted generative syntacticians to base their research on a methodology in which studying language through a corpus of observed speech became downplayed, since the grammatical properties of constructed sentences were considered to be appropriate data on which to build a grammatical model. Without this change in philosophy, the construction of generative grammars, when conceived of as a some kind of representation of mental grammars, would have been almost impossible at the time, since gathering the necessary data to assess a speakers mental grammar would have been prohibitively difficult.

Minimalism

In the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, much research in transformational grammar was inspired by

Chomsky’s Minimalist Program.[9] The “Minimalist Program” aims at the further development of ideas involving economy of derivation and economy of representation, which had started to become significant in the early 1990s, but were still rather peripheral aspects of Transformational-generative grammar theory.

Economy of derivation is a principle stating that movements (i.e. transformations) only occur

in order to match interpretable features with uninterpretable features. An example of an interpretable feature is the plural inflection on regular English nouns, e.g. dogs. The word dogs can only be used to refer to several dogs, not a single dog, and so this inflection contributes to meaning, making it interpretable. English verbs are inflected according to the grammatical number of their subject (e.g. “Dogs bite” vs “A dog bites“), but in most sentences this inflection just duplicates the information about number that the subject noun already has, and it is therefore uninterpretable.

Economy of representation is the principle that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose, i.e. the structure of a sentence should be no larger or more complex than required to

satisfy constraints on grammaticality. Both notions, as described here, are somewhat vague, and indeed the precise formulation of these principles is controversial.[10][11] An additional aspect of minimalist thought is the idea that the derivation of syntactic structures should be uniform; that is, rules should not be stipulated as applying at arbitrary points in a derivation, but instead apply throughout derivations. Minimalist approaches to phrase structure have resulted in “Bare Phrase Structure”, an attempt to eliminate X-bar theory. In 1998, Chomsky suggested that derivations proceed in “phases”. The distinction of Deep Structure vs. Surface Structure is not present in Minimalist theories of syntax, and the most recent phase-based theories also eliminate LF and PF as unitary levels of representation.

Mathematical representation

Returning to the more general mathematical notion of a grammar, an important feature of all

transformational grammars is that they are more powerful than context free grammars.[12] This idea was formalized by Chomsky in the Chomsky hierarchy. Chomsky argued that it is impossible to describe the structure of natural languages using context free grammars.[13] His general position egarding the non-context-freeness of natural language has held up since then, although his specific examples regarding the inadequacy of CFGs in terms of their weak generative capacity were later disproven. [14] [15]

Transformations

The usual usage of the term ‘transformation’ in linguistics refers to a rule that takes an input typically

called the Deep Structure (in the Standard Theory) or D-structure (in the extended standard theory or government and binding theory) and changes it in some restricted way to result in a Surface Structure (or S-structure). In TGG, Deep structures were generated by a set of phrase structure rules.

For example a typical transformation in TG is the operation of subject-auxiliary inversion (SAI). This rule takes as its input a declarative sentence with an auxiliary: “John has eaten all the heirloom tomatoes.” and transforms it into “Has John eaten all the heirloom tomatoes?”. In their original formulation (Chomsky 1957), these rules were stated as rules that held over strings of either terminals or constituent symbols or both.

X NP AUX Y X AUX NP Y

(where NP = Noun Phrase and AUX = Auxiliary)

In the 1970s, by the time of the Extended Standard Theory, following the work of Joseph Emonds on structure preservation, transformations came to be viewed as holding over trees. By the end of government and binding theory in the late 1980s, transformations are no longer structure changing operations at all, instead they add information to already existing trees by copying constituents. The earliest conceptions of transformations were that they were construction-specific devices. For example, there was a transformation that turned active sentences into passive ones. A different transformation raised embedded subjects into main clause subject position in sentences such as “John seems to have gone”; and yet a third reordered arguments in the dative alternation. With the shift from rules to principles and constraints that was found in the 1970s, these construction specific transformations morphed into general rules (all the examples just mentioned being instances of NP movement), which eventually changed into the single general rule of move alpha or Move.

Transformations actually come of two types: (i) the post-Deep structure kind mentioned above,which are string or structure changing, and (ii) Generalized Transformations (GTs). Generalized transformations were originally proposed in the earliest forms of generative grammar (e.g. Chomsky1957). They take small structures which are either atomic or generated by other rules, and combine them. For example, the generalized transformation of embedding would take the kernel “Dave said X” and the kernel “Dan likes smoking” and combine them into “Dave said Dan likes smoking”. GTs are thus structure building rather than structure changing. In the Extended Standard Theory and government and binding theory, GTs were abandoned in favor of recursive phrase structure rules.

However, they are still present in tree-adjoining grammar as the Substitution and Adjunction

operations and they have recently re-emerged in mainstream generative grammar in Minimalism as the operations Merge and Move

References

1. Apple, R. and Muyskens, P.  1987. Language Contact and Bilingualism. New York: Edward Arnold

2. Celce-Murcia, M., Dornyei, Z., and Thurrell, S. 1995. Communicative Competence: A Pedagogically Motivated model with Content Specifications. Issues in Applied Linguistics, Vol. 6 No. 2 pp.5-35.

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6. Halliday, M.A.K and Hasan, R. 1989. Language, Context and Text : Aspect of Language in a social-Semiotic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7. Kadarisman, A.E. 2009. Mengurai Bahasa Menyibak Budaya. Malang: Penerbit Universitas Negeri Malang.

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9. Steinberg, D.D. 1993. An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. London: Longman.