Artley, I'm sure it was dropped. It's usually offered in grad linguistics programs, and even then, only programs that are theoretical in their orientation. And I remember very few specifics from the course; it was more that it informed my thinking about grammar at a foundational level.


SlumberKitty, Transformational or Transformational Generative Grammar is a paradigm developed by Noam Chomsky as a way of conceiving of grammar not prescriptively, like we all learned in school, but as a conceptual framework to understand the structure of language as an inherent capacity, comprised of both an internal awareness and an externalized influence. So it assumes that language has inherent structure and relationships between parts that are reflective of both internal capacity for language and external usage input from the environment. Sometimes it's described as the "deep structure" of all language.


The sort of rules we associate with prescriptive grammar are only descriptive of externalized language. TG helps explain a lot about the gap between what native speakers of a language intuitively understand about the relationship between form and meaning, and what non-native speakers find contradictory and experience as "exceptions to the rules"--which English is full of!

But I don't think this^ will fit on a pillow!