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INTRODUCTORY TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR Second Edition BY MARK LESTER (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 2 ed., 1976. 350 pages.) It is obvious that this meticulously prepared text is the result of many years of teaching basic concepts of transformational grammar to students who will probably never be linguists, but will still need to understand modern linguistic notions. The introduction contains a brief, though very effective, contrast of the goals of traditional, structural and transformational grammars, with quotes from Jespersen, Fries and Chomsky. The transformationalist's argument with American structural linguistics is given as succinctly and effectively as teachers will find in any text. Each chapter thereafter is followed by abundant self-correcting exercises which will be appreciated by both teacher and student. Lester's explanations in the 12 chapters represents a compromise between rigorous transformational theory and traditional and descriptive ideas, accompanied by Jespersen-like commentary. One can only assume that he makes the compromise to achieve his goal, which includes equipping the student to read, evaluate and use modern publications , and to use other kinds of reference works such as Jespersen's Essentials of English Grammar and Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartik's A Grammar of Contemporary English. The goal is laudable, but the compromise gives transformational grammar more credit for handling the complex structures of English than it deserves, and therein lies a potential problem. In explaining the operation of rules, Lester makes no reference to structural descriptions necessary before transformations can apply, and he chooses not to include question, negative, imperative, and emphatic in deep structure. Rather, he prefers to show how strings are changed into questions, etc., without addressing the problems of meaning in the deep structure or meaning changed or introduced by transformations. Another departure from familiar texts is his practice of having indirect object and direct object noun phrases, and all non-optional adverbials dominated by a complement node. All main verbs must be followed by a complement, even if the complement is null. Also, prepositional phrases which show time, manner, position or direction are dominated by labels such as Adv Manner, etc., a practice that creates for many an uncomfortable mixture of category and function symbols in the phrase structure rules. MELVIN J. LUTHY* *MELVIN J. LUTHY is an associate professor of English and linguistics at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Phonological and Lexical Aspects of Colloquial Finnish (1973), and other works in Finno-Urgic and English linguistics , including recent articles in College Composition and Communication and College English. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW161 ...

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