ABSTRACT
Grammatical structure, then, as well as the senses of individual words, is determinant of the sense or semantic interpretation of sentences. The central thesis of the transformational grammarians, the step which conditions the whole character of their theories, is the insistence that any adequate grammatical theory must recognize a distinction between the superficial syntactic structure of a sentence and its basic structure, between its deep grammar and its surface grammar. The syntactic component, then, of a grammar or theory of a language consists of a system of rules, permissive or mandatory, which operate, finally, on certain elements. So much by way of a sketch of the type of theory of a language envisaged by some transformational grammarians. This chapter summarizes the linguistic ability of an ideally fluent and correct speaker of a language as the ability to understand, produce, and criticize indefinitely many new sentences of his language.
