Transformational Analysis
Max Silberztein · 2016
Transformational grammar focuses on relationships between sentences that share the same lexical material. This chapter examines transformational analysis, which aims to produce elementary sentences (or predicates) expressed by a complex sentence, or conversely to compute complex sentences from one or several elementary sentences. It shows that there is no such thing as a transformational grammar that would exist independently from other levels of the linguistic description that is transformational analysis can and must be carried out using only structural syntactic grammars. Transformational analysis is very similar to semantic analysis, and the chapter discusses how it could be used to implement some sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) applications such as question answering or machine translation. Automatic generation programs produce texts in natural language from a semantic representation. Building the language's generative grammar allows to describe its sentences from a transformational point of view.