What is Transformational Grammar?

An example would be: 1. The cat was chased by the dog.

2. The dog chased the cat.

The two sentences convey the same idea yet they differ somehow. That's transformational grammar.

I think understanding transformational grammar is extremely important for anyone who writes, especially for novelists or people writing fiction.

If you are trying to write a great book, the words you choose can make or break the atmosphere. I've read some books that had subpar plots, but the writing was so vivid and exciting that I wanted to keep reading. On the other hand, there have been a lot of books that, reading the blurb, I thought would be great. After I started, though, the writing was so stilted and dull that it ruined a great plot idea.

I like, too, that the article mentioned using transformational grammar in double entendres. As I was reading the article, I started thinking about how important having a good grasp of word connotations can be in making good puns or writing jokes.

@cardsfan27 - It sounds like you were probably wise enough to understand the connotation of words, but I have run into some people who don't completely understand the importance of transformational grammar. I used to work as a teacher's aide at a high school for a couple of years. Whenever I would grade papers, it was obvious that someone just used the synonym feature on Word without fully recognizing what impact that word would have on the sentence.

I have heard about Noam Chomsky before, but never really knew what he did. It is interesting that it took so long for anyone to push for the importance of transformational grammar as something that should be its own field of study.

@jcraig3 - I would say that could be good example. Basically, I think a good transformation grammar definition might be something like the study of the connotations of words. There would be thousands of examples if you just sat down and thought about it long enough. It has always been interesting to me how words can project different feelings depending on how they are used. Like in your example, someone in the field of forestry would immediately object to that use of the word, but a normal person might think nothing of it.

I've often been in similar situations to that, as well. I guess part of it may be that I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I always try to find the right word. Whenever I was writing important papers, I would sit and think about what word to use for several minutes sometimes. Unfortunately, back in those days, we didn't have the internet, so I had to thumb through a thesaurus or brainstorm with my roommate.

@Denha - I think the gist of transformational grammar is that certain words have very precise meanings in certain circumstances even though they might be able to be thought of as synonyms.

I run into the issue quite often when I am writing scientific type papers. One example that I ran into recently was the use of the verb "exploit." Depending on the context, to exploit something can just mean to get use out of it. I work in the field of forestry, though, where exploiting a forest usually means that someone is just cutting trees wrecklessly.

A paper I was proofreading used the phrase "exploiting forests" to mean getting benefit out of them, but the first thing most professionals in the field would think of reading that phrase is destroying a forest, so it was important to change the word to something more suitable like "utilizing."

From this article, I am still a little confused about what transformational grammar does, exactly. I would be interested to find out more particularly because I teach English abroad, and anything to help me understand grammar more fully could be transferred to helping my students understand.

It would be helpful to have more examples.